Best Motivational Speech Compilation EVER | 3 Hours of the Best Motivation

the easiest thing i've done was to get out from under the labels and to live the life that i live the most difficult thing i've ever done was to believe that i can do it the difference is that when you don't know what's impacting you and it's it's something that that's holding you down and you're not aware of it there are things that when you in my situation you live in a dominant culture that is designed to destroy your sense of self and your belief in yourself and and you have to learn ways in which you can begin to connect with this power that you have within yourself to handle where you are the key is to be constantly in a perpetual process of discovering the truth of who you are and fighting constantly to look for ways in which you can escape the inner conversation between ages 0 and 5 we determine what's available to us and what's not available to us and so that was a defining moment i knew there are certain things i could not do certain places i could not go they used to have signs on miami beach that said jews dogs and cullets not allowed and so now you have to operate within the constraints of the dominant society and the things that they've created for you and it's a challenge to see yourself beyond that and to work to get outside of that even after those laws have changed because that has become so much a part of you you unconsciously operate within the parameters of what has been put in place like you go to you're driving on the expressway the four or five and and you'll get off on an exit that you weren't going in that direction but you unconsciously did it because you've done it so many times that many people because they're not making a conscious deliberate determined effort to think outside of what life has thrown at them they end up doing the same thing over and over and over again einstein said that thinking that has brought me this far has created some problems that this thinking can't solve and so through relationships through reading through studies through goals and dreams beyond your comfort zone it allows you to begin to live out of your imagination as opposed to out of your history disney said the imagination is a preview of what's to come they have to expose themselves to something that will give them a different vision of themselves and in addition to that they have to put themselves in a community of what i call oqp only quality people a gentleman who dramatically transformed my life i was a junior at booger t washington high school in miami florida and i went in his class looking for another friend and and he said go to the board and work this problem out for me i said sir i can't do that he said why not i said i'm not one of your students he said do it anyhow. and and the other kid started laughing saying he's leslie he's dt and he said what's dt he's his brother is smart but he's the dumb twin and and i said i am sir and he came from behind his desk and he pointed at me said don't you ever say that again someone's opinion of you does not have to become your reality and he taught me three things he said if you want to become successful in life young man he said number one you got to change your mindset he said you don't get in life what you want you get in life what you are number two practice oqp only quality people you earned within two to three thousand dollars of your closest friends i found that out i left all my broke friends i said y'all got to go because i used to be so broke i passed the bank and tripped the alarm you know and the third thing is that develop your communication skills because once you open your mouth you tell the world who you are he said those are three major things that you want to work on that will liberate you from living in liberty city living in poverty and over town it will help to escape out of where you are right now because i see you watching me and i know you want more i can see the hunger in your eyes you get hungry by finding something that's you i believe that all of us are born unique but most of us dye copies you've got to find out what is it that turns you on what resonates with you one of the things that i realized and what allowed me to become successful as a speaker the speaking industry has been hijacked by people who speak to sell and it's it's okay to do that and make money i speak to change lives because somebody spoke and changed my life so this is my passion this is my drive this is something that i feel in my heart and and so the key to that hunger driven life is a heart-centered life i didn't do what i'm doing for years because of my programming because of the culture in which i was raised in i would see other people with with degrees and phds and and mbas and credentials i don't have and i convinced myself i couldn't do it but mr washington on that day we became friends and and he taught me not only someone's opinion of you just does not have to determine your reality he said that you have to work on yourself and you have to have an unstoppable attitude and no excuse is acceptable and you've got to to make it a a priority a non-negotiable in your life and hold a constant vision of what it is you want to achieve see it accomplished and go all out find a way to win in spite of the setbacks in spite of the disappointments in spite of your failures i tell people when i'm giving presentations you will fail your way to success i have a saying is life knocks you down trying to land on your back because if you can look up you can get up and so those experiences of of going after goals that's beyond your comfort zone and having relationships that will challenge you and surrounding yourself with coaches and mentors who can take you to a place within yourself that you can't go by yourself because you can't read the label when you're locked in the box and so those experiences they challenge you to go to that next level and continue to move forward in your life doing new and exciting things that i has not seen ear has not heard knows in the heart of mankind what god has in store for you when you live a hard hard-centered life deciding that you're going to live a life that will outlive you you're going to live a life that counts a life that will build a legacy and change the planet you know hearth's man said we should be ashamed to die until we've made some major contribution to humankind and so my goal is to make a major contribution to humankind [Music] every day when i get up my mindset is what is it that i can do to touch and impact somebody's life today what is it what does that look like don't live the life that has been given you by their circumstances by the people that's around you that sydney port here wrote a book called the measure of a man and he said when you go for a walk with someone something happens without being spoken he said either you adjust to their pace or they adjust to your pace whose pace have you adjusted to and so the things that we pick up and we think that there are choices but they're the choices that we've been programmed by life to to do when we leave our homes in the morning we're bombarded with over 6 000 advertising hits through facebook through twitter through instagram through television through our phones and through our communities and through the computers and so all of these things are impacting us every day so if you don't have a program for your mind then your mind is going to be programmed and you'll find yourself doing things that you did not know and and that they affected you that they through marketing techniques and strategies that they will create a thirst within you i came up in an era that said if you built the best mouse trap the world will be the path to your door but if you know marketing people will sleep outside your store to buy a telephone they've never touched or seen let's try to think what could i say that could actually be helpful or useful to you in the future and i thought perhaps tell the story of how i sort of came to be here how did some of these things happen and maybe there's some lessons there because i often find myself wondering how did this happen so when i was young i i i didn't really know what i was going to do when i got older people kept asking me and eventually i thought that the idea of inventing things would be would be really cool and the reason i thought that was because i i read a quote from arthur c clarke which said that efficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic and that's really true if you go back say 300 years the things that we take for granted today you'd be burned at the stake for you know being able to fly that's crazy being able to see over long distances being able to communicate having um effectively with the internet a group mind of sorts and having access to all the world's information instantly from almost anywhere in the earth this is stuff that that really would be magic it would be considered magic in times past in fact i think it actually goes beyond that because there are many things that we take for granted today that weren't even imagined in times past they weren't even in the realm of magic so that it actually goes goes beyond that so i thought well you know if if i can do some of those things basically if i can advance technology then that's like magic and that would be really cool and i always had sort of a slight existential crisis because i was trying to figure out what does it all mean like what's the purpose of things and i came to the conclusion that if we can advance the knowledge of the world if we can do things that expand the scope and scale of consciousness then we're better able to ask the right questions and become more enlightened and that's really the only way forward so i studied physics and business because i figured in order to do a lot of these things you need to know how the universe works and you need to know how the economy works and you also need to be able to bring a lot of people together to work with you to create something because it's very difficult to do something as as an individual if it's if it's a significant technology so i originally came out to to california to try to figure out how to improve the energy density of of electric vehicles basically to try to figure out if there was an advanced capacitor that that could serve as an alternative to batteries that was in 95 and that's also when the internet started to happen and i thought well i can either pursue this with technology where success maybe may not be one of the possible outcomes which is always tricky or participate in the internet and and be part of it so i decided to drop out did some internet stuff [Music] they've did a few things here and there one of which was paypal and and i think maybe it's helpful to say one of the things that was important then in the creation of paypal was kind of how it started because the initial thought was with paypal was to create an agglomeration of financial services so if you have one place where all your financial services needs would be seamlessly integrated and work smoothly and then we had like a little feature which was to do email payments and whenever we'd show the system off to someone we'd show the hard part which was the agglomeration of financial services which was quite difficult to put together nobody was interested then we'd show people email payments which was actually quite easy and everybody was interested so this is uh i think it's important to to take feedback from your environment you know you want to be as closed loop as possible so we focus on email payments and really try to make that work and that's what really got things to take off but if we hadn't responded to what people said then we probably would not have been successful so it's important to look for things like that and focus on them when you see them and you correct your prior assumptions and then going from paypal i thought it will what are some of the the other problems that uh are likely to most affect the future of humanity it really wasn't from the perspective of what's the rancor best way to to make money which is okay but it was really what i think is going to most affect the future humanity so i think the the biggest terrestrial problem we've got is sustainable energy but the production and consumption of energy in a sustainable manner if we don't solve that the century we're we're in deep trouble and then the other one being the extension of life beyond earth to make life multi-planetary so the latter is the basis for spacex and the former is the basis for tesla and solar city and when i started spacex it was actually initially i thought that well there's no way one could possibly start a rocket company i wasn't that crazy i thought well what is a way to increase nasa's budget that was actually my initial goal so i thought well if we can do a low-cost mission to mars something called mars oasis which would land seeds and dehydrated nutrient gel and you hydrate them upon landing and then you'd have this great sort of money shot of green plants on a red background the public tends to respond to precedents and superlatives and this would be the first life on mars the furthest that life's ever traveled as far as we know and i thought well that would get people really excited and therefore increase at nasa's budget so obviously the financial outcome from such a mission would probably be zero so anything better than that was on the upside so i actually went to russia three times to look at buying a refurbished icbm because that was the best deal and uh i can tell you it was very weird going there in 2000 late 2001 2002 going to the russian rocket forces and saying i'd like to buy two of your biggest rockets but you can keep the nuke that's a lot more they thought i was crazy but i did have money so that was that was okay after making several trips to to russia i came to the conclusion that actually my initial impression was was wrong because my initial thought was well that there's not enough will to explore and expand beyond earth and have a mars base and that kind of thing but i can't conclusion that that was wrong in fact there's plenty of world particularly in the united states uh because the united states is a nation of explorers the people who came here from from other parts of the world i think the united states is really a distillation of the spirit of human exploration but if people think it's impossible or it's going to completely break the federal budget then they're not going to do it so after my third trip i said okay what we really need to do here is try to solve the space transport problem and uh and started spacex and uh this was against the advice of pretty much everyone i talked to but one friend made me sit down and watch a bunch of videos rockets blowing up let me tell you he wasn't far wrong it was tough going there in the beginning because i'd never built anything physical i mean i built like little model rockets as a kid and that kind of thing but i never had a company that built anything physical so i'd kind of figure out how to do all these things and bring together the right team of people and so we did all that and then failed three times it was tough tough going because thing about a rocket is the passing grade is 100 and uh you don't get to actually test the rocket in the real environment that it's going to be in so i think so the best analogy for rocket engineering is like if you want to create a really complicated bit of software you can't run the software as an integrated hole and you can't run it on the computer it's intended to run on but the first time you put it all together and write it on that computer it must run with no bugs that's basically the essence of it so we missed the mark there the first launch i was picking up bits of rocket near the launch site it was a bit sad we learned with each successive flight and were able to eventually with the fourth flight in 2008 uh reach orbit [Music] and that was also with the last bit of money that we had so um thank goodness that happened i think the saying is fourth time's the charm [Music] so we got the falcon 12 orbit and then uh began to scale that up to the falcon 9 which is about an order of magnitude more a thrust it's uh around a million pounds of thrust and we managed to get that to orbit and then i developed a dragon spacecraft uh which um recently was able to dock and return to earth from the space station that was a white knuckled event it's a huge relief i still can't quite believe it actually happened but there's a lot more that must happen beyond this in order for humanity to become a space-faring civilization ultimately a multi-planet species and that's something i think it's vitally important and i hope that some of you will participate in that either at spacex or at other companies because it's just really one of the most important things for the preservation and extension of consciousness it's worth noting as i'm sure people are aware that the earth has been around for four billion years and civilization at least in terms of having writing has been around for 10 000 years and that's being generous so it's really uh somewhat of a tenuous existence that civilization and and consciousness as we know it has been on earth and i think um i'm actually fairly optimistic about the future of earth i don't want to sort of people to have the wrong impression that i think we're all about to die i think things will most likely be okay for a long time on earth but not for sure but most likely but even if it's sort of 99 likely a one percent chance it's still worth spending a fair bit of effort to ensure that we have backed up the biosphere you know planetary redundancy if you will so i think i think it's really really quite important and in order to do that there's a breakthrough that needs to occur which is to create a rapidly and completely reusable transport system to mars which is one of those things that's right on the borderline of impossible that's sort of the thing that we're gonna try to achieve that with spacex and then on the tesla front the goal with tesla was really to try to show what electric cars can do because people had the wrong impression we had to change people's perception of an electric vehicle because they used to think of it as something that was slow and ugly and had low range kind of like a golf cart so that's why we created the tesla roadster to show that you can be fast attractive and and long range and it's amazing how even though you can show that something works on paper and the calculations are very clear until you actually have the physical object and they can drive it it doesn't really sink in for people so that i think is something worth noting if you're going to create a company the first thing you should try to do is create a working prototype you know everything everything looks great on powerpoint you can make anything work on powerpoint but if you're an actual demonstration article even if it's in primitive form that's much much more effective for convincing people after we made the tesla roadster people said oh sure sure we always knew you could make a car like that it's an expensive car and it's low volume and it's small and all that but you couldn't make a real car like okay fine you gotta make that too but um i i think the overarching point i wanna make is that you guys are the magicians of the 21st century don't let anything hold you back imagination is the limit and go out there and create some magic thank you sit on your bed one day and ask yourself uh what's what remarkably stupid things am i doing on a regular basis to absolutely screw up my life and if you actually ask that question but you have to want to know the answer right because that's actually what asking the question means it doesn't mean just mouthing the words it means you have to decide that you want to know you'll figure that's out so fast it'll make your hair curl there's no better pathway to self-realization and the ennoblement of being than to posit the highest good that you can conceive of and commit yourself to it and then you might also ask yourself and this is definitely worth asking is do you really have anything better to do and if you don't well why would you do anything else if you orient yourself properly and then pay attention to what you do every day that works and it i actually think that that's in accordance with with what we have come to understand about human perception because what happens is that the world shifts itself around your aim because you're you're a creature that has a name you have to have a name in order to do something you're an aiming creature you look at a point and you move towards it it's built right into you and so you have a name well let's say your aim is the highest possible aim well then so that sets up the world around you it organizes all of your perceptions it organizes what you see and you don't see it organizes your emotions and your motivations so you organize yourself around that aim and then what happens is the day manifests itself as a set of challenges and problems and if you solve them properly then you stay on the pathway towards that eighth and you can concentrate on the on the on the day and so that way you get to have your cake and eat it too because you can you can point into the distance the far distance and you can live in the day and it seems to me that that's that makes every moment of the day supercharged with meaning that that's how because if everything that you're doing every day is related to the highest possible aim that you can conceptualize well that's the very definition of the meaning that would sustain you in your life well and then the issue is well back to noah well all hell's about to break loose and chaos is coming it's like when that's happening in your life you might want to be doing something that you regard as truly worthwhile because that's what will keep you afloat when when everything is flooded and you don't want to wait until the flood comes to start doing that because if your ark's half built and you don't know how to captain it the probability is very high that that you'll drown ask and it shall be given you seek and ye shall find knock and it shall be opened unto you for everyone that asketh receiveth and he that seeketh findeth and to him that knocketh it shall be opened that sounded pretty optimistic again but but again i think it's a description of the structure of existential reality and and by which i mean when i'm in my clinical practice and i observe and this is also the case with my students is let's say people's lives aren't what they would like them to be and so then you ask why well forget about tragedy and catastrophe because that's self-evident and we're not going to discuss that although the degree to which you bring about your own tragedy is always indeterminate but i would never say that every terrible thing that is visited on a person is something they deserved i think that that's a very dangerous presupposition especially because everyone gets sick and everyone dies but one of the main reasons that people don't get what they want is because they don't actually figure out what it is and the probability that you're going to get what would be good for you let's say which would even be better than what you want right because you know you might be wrong about what you want easily but maybe you could get what would really be good for you well why don't you well because you don't try you don't think okay here's what i would like if i could have it and and i don't mean i don't mean in a way that you manipulate the world to force it to deliver you goods for status or something like that that isn't what i mean i mean something like imagine that you are taking care of yourself like you were someone you actually cared for and then you thought okay i'm caring for this person i would like things to go as well for them as possible what would their life have to be like in order for that to be the case well people don't do that they don't sit down and think all right you know let's let's figure it out you've got a life it's hard obviously it's like three years from now you can have what you need you got to be careful about it you can't have everything you can have what would be good for you but you have to figure out what it is and then you have to aim at it well my experience with people has been is if they figure out what it is that would be good for them and then they aim at it then they get it and it's strange because they don't necess it's a strange thing it's not quite that simple because you know you may formulate an idea about what would be good for you and then you take 10 steps towards that and you find out that your formulation was a bit off and so you have to reformulate your goal you know so you're kind of going like this as you move towards the goal but a huge part of the reason that people fail is because they don't ever set up the criteria for success and so since success is a very narrow line and very unlikely the probability that you're going to stumble on it randomly is zero and so there's a proposition here and the proposition is if you actually want something you can have it now the question then would be well what do you mean by actually want and the answer is that you reorient your life in every possible way to make the probability that that will occur as certain as possible and that's a sacrificial idea right it's like you don't get everything obviously you obviously but maybe you can have what you need and maybe all you have to do to get it is ask but asking isn't a whim or or today's wish it's like you have to be deadly serious about it you have to think okay like i'm taking stock of myself and if i was going to live properly in the world and i was going to set myself up such that being would justify itself in my estimation and i don't mean as a harsh judge exactly what is it that i would aim at and so the issue is not so much the blindness of others even though there's as much blindness among others as there is as there is for you but the issue here the advice here the description here is you should be concerned about what's interfering with your own vision first and you should leave other people the hell alone in relationship to that and so if your mode of being in the world is if you would just act better things would improve for me or if you identify the evil and the catastrophe as something that's outside that someone else needs to fix or that someone's response someone else is responsible for then you're not going to fix that and you're going to remain blind to the things that you're doing and not doing that make things not go well and so it's just better to think all right i'm probably blind in many many ways and maybe there are some ways that i could rectify that because it's highly probable that you're blind in all sorts of ways i mean it's in fact it's virtually certain and so it's just more useful to think how is it that i'm wrong in this situation i'll tell you something that i learned to do when i was arguing with my wife which happened quite frequently because when you actually communicate with people you find out that there's many things that you don't agree on and that's because you're actually different creatures and so if you're actually going to have a truthful conversation then you're going to find out that you don't see things the same way and then you can either pretend that that's not the case and gloss over it and then end up in a 30-year silent war or you can or you can have the damn fight when you need to have it and see if you can straighten it out so now and then we'd get in a situation where we were at loggerheads we couldn't move and you know it would spiral up into hate speech let's say because yeah everyone laughs because they know they manifest plenty of hate speech towards those they love so one of the things we learned to do was when we hit an impasse was to separate and to go our own ways and to go sit and think okay look we're at this unpleasant situation we can't figure out how to move forward i'd always think of course it's her fault obviously it's her fault at least 95 percent but maybe there was something i did that contributed like five percent to it the amount information that's been created from the dawn of humanity since human beings walk this planet to the year 2003 which is only what a decade and a half ago that amount information how long does it take to create that nowadays two days the amount of information is doubling at dizzying speeds but how we learn it how we absorb it focus retain it apply it it's pretty much flat line and that growing gap creates something called anxiety they call it information fatigue syndrome because everything's a syndrome right higher blood pressure compression of leisure time more sleeplessness because we live in an age where you know electric cars and spaceships that are going to mars but our vehicle of choice when it comes to learning and education is like a horse and buggy you know like the education system has not we all grew up with the 20th century education that prepared us for 20th century world which at the turn of the 20th century was working in farms and factories and that's what the education was it was assembly line cookie cutter one size fits all but now we live in a world where the world's changing so much someone graduating school today is going to have 8 to 14 different careers can you imagine that not jobs but different careers because we don't know where the world's going to be so your ability to out learn out think outperform i mean that's your greatest advantage if there's one skill to master in the 21st century it's your ability to learn rapidly to be able to keep up so it's digital overload digital this second digital super villain today that i think is a health threat to everyone listening whether you're an entrepreneur you're a parent you're a high achiever this is this thing called digital distraction think about all the social media alerts the app updates i mean our minds are being fried because we're getting these dopamine fixes all the time do you know how often the average person opens up instagram it's now 150 times and then if you guys are opening up a less that means somebody's opening up a whole lot more but that's by design right because every like share comment you get this dopamine flowed and it drives our you know our our habits and our addiction if you will and we talk a lot about routines and then we're going to talk about how to jump start your brain morning routine evening routines because i mean really the success that everyone is desiring it's hidden in our daily habits right first you create your habits and then your habits create you but one of the things that a bad habit the most successful people they have their to-do list and we all have our to-do list but i've also noticed that some of the highest achievers they have a not-to-do list you know what i mean they have a list of non-negotiable things they will not indulge in because you know we've all read the book good to great you say no to good so you could say yes to great right and a lot of times when you get more and more successful you suffer from this opportunity stress right you get more and more offers more and more opportunity and you can't say yes to everything and that's a big challenge because then you have so many windows open on your computer and even if they're minimized they still take up energy and they still take up space and memory and you wonder why you're fatigued all the time you wonder why you don't have the mental energy to do the things that you need to be able to do so digital distraction and on the top of your not to do list should be not checking your phone in the first thing in the morning and i know everyone's listening to me and and automatically so many people are just like oh my god you know like i hate you know i hate this guy but the first hour of the day the reason why you don't want to pick up your phone is because and we're all guilty of this is because it rewires your brain for two things number one it rewires your brain for distraction when you wake up first thing in the morning you're in this relaxed alpha creative it's a very suggestible state right you just woke up and so you have to be very careful and protect the stand guard to your mind from outside influences because number one the first thing you see on your phone you're watching these cat videos and you know everything's going on social media you're getting this dopamine flood which is building your distraction muscles because when it comes to focus focus is it's like there's a focus fitness if you will and you have focused muscles but you also have distraction muscles and a lot of people their distraction muscles are way over developed because of picking the phone up first thing in the morning but the second reason for neurological reason why you don't want to pick up your phone the first hour of the day is because it also rewires your brain for reaction it's training your brain to be reactive and so you know as you know you go through your phone you wake up in the morning you pick up your phone you get one text one voicemail message one you know email and all of a sudden your date is shot like it puts you in a bad mood and you carry that mood throughout your entire day and that's a big challenge because you know if you're just fighting fires then you're just on the defense if you're just trying to fulfill everyone else's needs without going through like what's going to help me to win this day to own this you know this day to be able to make it the best then um then you're you're reacting and i have a friend brendon burchard he says your inbox is nothing but a convenient organizational system for other people's agenda for your life so you're training your brain to react and you can never have an incredible day for just reacting to things right so for me i wake up in the morning and when i just start journaling and i write down three things i want to accomplish personally that day and three things i want to accomplish professionally and it's different every single day but i always begin with the end in mind one of my favorite books of all time is this book called seven habits of highly effective people and we've read this book some people like i have that book and it's sitting on my shelf and it becomes shellfield not self-help right because nobody's actually like reading that book because so many people buy books and i have the i like to encourage people to read at least one book a week because the average person reads about two maybe three books a year but what i love about reading number one is the best exercise you know for your mind and you know it's it's like reading is to your mind what exercise is to your body it's an incredible workout and most people they don't take the time to read but the other reason i like to read um is if somebody has decades of experience in leadership negotiation entrepreneurship fitness and they put it into a book and you could sit down in a couple of days and read that book you could download decades of experience into days and that's a huge advantage right because leaders leaders are readers when i'm writing what i need to accomplish i'm writing put first things first put first things first meaning i believe that the most important thing is to keep the most important thing the most important thing the most important thing is to keep the most important thing the most important thing because a lot of people have a fear of failure or fear of success you know my my fear has always been i don't want to succeed at things that don't matter it wasn't so much about failing it's about getting really good at something that didn't make a difference and stephen covey talks about it like you're really good at climbing the ladder of success only to get to the top and realize that it's leaning on the wrong wall and so if you begin with the end in mind so i'm thinking about my friend clay bear has this phrase about champagne moments you know in sports it's very clear when you're popping that champagne what has to happen your criteria and for me i think about if i'm coming back you know at night and somebody asked me how my day was and i was like i crushed it today you know what had to happen working backwards in order for that to happen and i think about three things professionally three things personally and so i write that down first thing in the morning and then i don't check my phone until i get one of those checks done just at least one thing you know and then i'll get some positive momentum for example but that's the reason you don't want to check your phone it's training you to be distracted and it's rewiring your brain to be reactive and you can't be successful and fulfilled if you're just giving up the sovereignty your power to some something outside of yourself the third digital like super villain if you will when we're talking about you know digital uh challenges is um so you have digital overload digital distraction is digital dementia have you heard this term yet you're gonna hear this a lot in healthcare it's basically where we're outsourcing our our brains our minds to our smart devices oh this is why i can't remember anybody's phone number exactly i mean how many phone numbers did you know growing up has all of them all of them literally all of them because we had to right and how many phone numbers do you know right now but yeah exactly so you know like one or two there could be somebody you're texting or calling every single day and if your phone was dead or if you didn't have it with you you wouldn't honestly know what that number is and here's the thing i don't want to memorize 500 phone numbers nobody wants to do that but we've lost the ability to remember one phone number we've lost the ability to remember a conversation somebody's birthday i mean i feel like absent-mindedness i mean how many people feel like senior moments are coming too early like you walk into a room and you just forget why you're there or you open up the refrigerator you go to the store to buy one thing and you come back with like two bags full of things except for that one thing you went to you know get there get there or you can't remember if you you're in the shower you can't remember if you shampooed your hair your hair and i believe two of the most costly words in life and in business are i forgot you know i forgot to do it i forgot to bring it i forgot that conversation i forgot that meaning i forgot what i needed to say i forgot that name i mean i think number one business etiquette networking skill there is is remembering people's names we don't realize how much time we're spending on these devices right when you go and you actually look at the numbers when you look at your phone and you look at like just somebody saying like 24 hours a week you know on social media or whatever it is i mean that's people always say i have no time to read or i have no time to work out it has nothing to do with with time management it's all priority management i think the definition of greatness is to inspire the people next to you yeah i think that's what greatness is or should be it's not something that's that that lives and dies with one person is how can you inspire a person to then in turn inspire another person that inspires another person and that's how you create something that i think lasts forever and i think that's our challenge as people is to um is to figure out how our story can impact others and motivate them in a way to create their own greatness there's a quote from one of my english teachers a little marian named mr fisk he had a great quote that said rest at the end not in the middle and that's something i always live by you know i'm not going to rest i'm going to keep on pushing now a lot of answers that i don't have even questions that i don't have but i'm just going to keep going it's going to keep going and i'll figure these things out as you go right you just continue to build that way so that i try to live by that all the time and what brings you the most joy right now being with my family really that is man that is the most fun it's just um you know it's uh hanging out with them all summer being able to like do things that i ordinarily couldn't do yeah uh because of training because it's sure and stuff like that so being around them and watching bianca grow up because a lot of things that i missed with natalie and gianna because i was playing so being there every day with them is so much fun man so it brings me the most joy what does love feel like hmm happiness is such a i think i would describe love as happiness i think i'd describe it as a beautiful journey um you know it has its ups and downs right whether it's in marriage or whether it's in the career you know things are never perfect yeah but through love you continue to persevere and you move through them you move through and then through that storm beautiful sun emerges yeah right inevitably another storm comes guess what you ride that one out too so i think love is a certain determination and persistence to go through the good times and the bad times with someone or something that you truly love my parents were great you know growing up they instilled in me the importance of imagination of curiosity understanding that okay if you want to accomplish something i'm not just going to sit here and say yes you can do whatever you want yes you can but you have to also put in the work to get there right so they taught me that at a really early age man and when you grow up as a kid thinking that the world is your oyster all things are possible if you put in the work to do it you know you grow up having that fundamental belief my mom was there on a daily basis my father uh was really influential at a really critical time where i i had a summer where i played basketball when i was like 10 or 11 years old and a very prominent summer league in philadelphia called the sunny hill league where my father played my uncle played and they were like all-time great stuff and will chamberlain played in the league you know uh early promo roll playing lead and here i come playing and i don't score one point the entire summer really not one how old were you 11 10 11. you're playing against other 10 11 year olds or you didn't score once not one were you in the game i was in a game how did you not score because that was terrible really yeah that happened 11 years old you were that awful i mean i you know and i had these big knee pads on because i was growing really fast i have socks all the way up here and i had like the hot top like skinny as hell and i scored not a free throw not a nothing not a lucky shot not a breakaway layup zero points and i remember crying about it and being upset about it my father just gave me a hug and said listen whether you score zero or score 60 i'm gonna love you no matter what wow now that is the most important thing that you can say to a child because from there i was like okay that gives me all the confidence in the world to fail i have the security there but to hell with that i'm scoring 60. let's go right right right from there i just went to work i just i stayed with him i kept practicing kept practicing care practice you know when you're in this culture in our society you can do some phenomenal things individually but they'll never reach their full potential unless you do them collectively you have to figure out how to do that the challenge for me was always compassion and empathy i think about 09 things started changing for me i started really making a conscious effort to better understand and that doesn't mean you have compassion and empathy so you go softer it's more like you you put you put yourself to the side and you put yourself in their shoes and understand what they're feeling and then you have to make certain decisions of okay what buttons do i need to push with this player to get them to the next level so it's never it's not sit around and all it's all happy go lucky type of thing your leader your job is to get the best out of them um even if you know they may not like it at that time one of the things i had to learn is how to get the best out of my teammates yeah and most people think it's a simple thing you know passing the ball you know but that's how you make guys better you have to really affect their behavior how do you do that so yeah like i would tell guys you gotta back-to-backs you know i don't care if we're in miami i don't care if we're in a great city or chicago you can't go out we gotta get rest right back-to-back games back-to-back games right monday tuesday play monday and play again tuesday guys are gonna listen right you're gonna you're right so a few times all right well i'll go out go out together really i'll drink with you right but the next morning i'm banging on your door at five in the morning let's go they're not getting where are we going i hung out with you now you come hang out with me this is what we do all right let's go here at the gym we're working out right we hit the bus we go to practice we play that night and they're dead and they're dead they're like lesson learned lesson take them out once listen if you're gonna do that do that but don't let that compromise what we're here to do right this is why we're here this is why you're here in the first place what does losing feel like to you oh it's exciting why is it exciting um because it means you have different ways to get better there are certain things that you can figure out that you can take advantage of right certain weaknesses that were exposed um that you need to shore up right so it was exciting i mean it sucks to lose but at the same time their answer is there if you just look at them i give an example so katie lou samuelsson is one of the best college basketball players in the country she plays at uconn she's going to be a senior and they just had a really tough season last year where they lost to notre dame in the final and so i actually said have you watched the notre dame game she was like no well why not he said i don't want to watch that i said i know you don't but you're going to play notre dame this year yeah yeah there's a chance that you see him again in the final well you'll probably see me here say well you can't show up and play them without knowing why you lost that one right so you know the mistakes that you've made in that game you have to do the hard stuff and watch that game and study that game to not make those mistakes over and over again just because you weren't brave enough to face it so she came down to the office i brought down the office and we sat down we watched that game together wow right you gotta you gotta deal with it gotta deal with it face it learn from it when you play for 20 years i play for 20 years you reach a certain level you're like okay wait a minute i have to start again at the base of a mountain and try to climb the top of this mountain first of all what mountain am i climbing i don't even know like what the hell am i going to be doing and it'd be it's very it's very scary it's very even for you oh absolutely absolutely and the thing that helped me actually was hurting my achilles because that forced me to sit there and say okay the day could be today that your career is over now what do you do you have these ideas about doing something with your life after basketball but what if today is the day that you that's it now what do you do so i had all this time sitting there with my achilles injury and contemplating and thinking and i said i better get to work wow that was that the mentality book is is really about process and craft i've broken the book up into two sections and process is really about the process of preparing you know through injury recovery uh studying of the game and then the craft is the actual performance and the tactics and so a lot of things that i learned through the game were through photos you can look at a photo and see like a player making a move look at the angle of his feet look how he's using his hands on defense and i can really break down things to the smallest detail through that and that's what you'll see in this book i mean it's really a basketball bible you'll see how i break things down like how i'm looking at things the smallest of detail yeah and that's the best way to understand how to have that kind of mentality is to ask questions then find answers and then lead to more questions you find more answers and that's what the book is so how can we teach our children what it means to work hard well you do it through training right so when i get up in the morning my daughter goes with me 4 am 4 am my 15 year old goes with me she goes with me before school and it becomes a daddy-daughter thing that's cool she just got a permit right so she drives in the morning it becomes a cool thing right but through that process she understands the value of hard work and things taking time and the same thing with my 12 year old she practices every day right and so it's through those behaviors is where i find the motivation to do it i found that nothing in life is worthwhile unless you take risks nothing nelson mandela said there is no passion to be found playing small in settling for a life that's less than the one you're capable of living now i'm sure in your experiences in school and applying to college and picking your major and deciding what you want to do with life i'm sure people have told you to make sure you have something to fall back on make sure you got something to fall back on honey but i never understood that concept having something to fall back on if i'm going to fall i don't want to fall back on anything except my faith i want to fall forward i figure at least this way i'll see what i'm going to hit fall forward this is what i mean reggie jackson struck out 2600 times in his career the most in the history of baseball but you don't hear about the strikeouts people remember the home runs [Music] fall forward thomas edison conducted 1 000 failed experiments did you know that i didn't know that because the one thousand and first was the light bulb fall forward every failed experiment is one step closer to success you've got to take risks and i'm sure you've probably heard that before but i want to talk to you about why that's so important first you will fail at some point in your life accept it you will lose you will embarrass yourself you will suck at something there's no doubt about it and i know that's probably not a traditional message for a graduation ceremony but hey i'm telling you embrace it because it's inevitable and i should know in the acting business you fail all the time early on in my career i auditioned for a part in a broadway musical perfect role for me i thought except for the fact that i can't sing so i'm i'm in the wings i'm about to go on stage but the guy in front of me he's singing like like like pavarotti he's just wrong just going on and on and on and i'm just shrinking i'm getting smaller and smaller so they say oh thank you very much thank you very much and you will you'll be hearing from us so i come out with my little sheet music and it was it was a just my imagination by the temptations that's what i came up with so i hand it to the the the accompanist and uh she looks at it and looks at me and looks out at the director and was like right so i i start you know i'm i'm gonna sing i'm like it's just my imagination once again [Music] and i'm not saying anything so i'm thinking i'm getting better so i just started getting into it running this oh yeah thank you thank you thank you thank you very much mr washington thank you so i assumed i didn't get the job [Music] but the next part of the audition he called me back the next part of the audition is the acting part of the audition now i'm like hey okay maybe i can't sing but i know i can act so they pair me with this guy and again i didn't know about musical theater and musical theater is big so they can reach everyone all the way in the back of the stadium and i'm more from realistic uh naturalistic kind of acting where you you know you actually talk to the person next to you so i don't know what my line was my line was well hand me the cup and his line was well i will hand you the cup my dear the cup will be there to be handed to you i said i said okay will should i give you the cup back oh yes you should give it back to me because you know that is my cup and it should be given back to me i didn't get the job but here's the thing i didn't quit i didn't fall back i walked out of there to prepare for the next audition and the next audition and the next audition i prayed i prayed and i prayed but i continued to fail and fail and fail but it didn't matter because you know what there's an old saying you hang around the barber shop long enough sooner or later you're going to get a haircut so you will catch a break and i did catch a break last year i did a play called fences on broadway someone talked about it won the tony award and i didn't have to sing by the way but here's the kicker it was at the court theater it was at the same theater that i failed that first audition 30 years prior the point is every graduate here today has the training and the talent to succeed but do you have the guts to fail here's my second point about failure if you don't fail you're not even trying i'll say it again if you don't fail you're not even trying my wife told me this great expression to get something you never had you have to do something you never did les brown's a motivational speaker he made an analogy about this he says imagine you're on your deathbed and standing around your deathbed are the ghosts representing your unfulfilled potential the ghost of the ideas you never acted on the ghost of the talents you didn't use and they're standing around your bed angry disappointed and upset they say we we came to you because you could have brought us to life they say and now we have to go to the grave together so i ask you today how many ghosts are going to be around your bed when your time comes you've invested you you've invested a lot in your education and people have invested in you and let me tell you the world needs your talents man does it ever i just got back from africa like two days ago so if i'm rambling on it's cause i'm jet lag i just got back from south africa it's a beautiful country but there are places there with terrible poverty that need help and africa is just the tip of the iceberg the middle east needs your help japan needs your help alabama needs your help tennessee needs your help louisiana needs your help philadelphia needs your help the world needs a lot and we need it from you we really do we need it from you young people i mean i'm not speaking for the rest of us up here but i know i'm getting a little grayer we need it from you the young people so you got to get out there you got to give it everything you got whether it's your time your talent your prayers or your treasures because remember this you will never see a u-haul behind a hearse you will never see a u-haul behind a hearse you can't take it with you the egyptians tried it and all they got was robbed so the question is what are you going to do with what you have i'm not talking about how much you have some of you are business majors some of you are theologians nurses sociologists some of you have money some of you have patience some of you have kindness some of you have loved some of you have the gift of long-suffering whatever it is whatever your gift is what are you going to do with what you have [Music] all right now here's my last point about failure [Music] sometimes it's the best way to figure out where you're going your life will never be a straight path i began at fordham university as a pre-med student i i i took a course called the cardiac morphos i still can't say it cardiac cardiac morphogenesis i couldn't read it i couldn't say it i sure couldn't pass it so then i decided to go into pre-law then journalism and with no academic focus my grades took off in their own direction they are down i was a 1.8 gpa one semester and the university very politely suggested that it might be better to take some time off [Music] i was 20 years old i was at my lowest point and then one day and i remember the exact day march 27 1975 i was helping my mother in her beauty shop my mother owned a beauty shop up in mount vernon and there's there was this older woman who was considered one of the elders in the town and i didn't know her personally but i i was looking in the mirror and every time i looked at the mirror i could see her behind me and she was staring at me she just kept looking at me every time i looked at it she kept giving me these strange looks so she finally took the dryer off her head and said she said something i'll never forget first of all she said somebody give me a piece of paper give me a piece of paper she said young boy i have a prophecy a spiritual prophecy she said you are going to travel the world and speak to millions of people now mind you i'm 20 years old i'm flunked out of school in fact like a wise ass i'm thinking to myself maybe she's got something in that crystal ball about me getting back into school next fall [Music] but maybe she was on to something because later that summer while working as a counselor at the ymca camp in connecticut we put on a talent show for the campers and after the show another counselor came up to me and asked have you ever thought about acting you're good at that so when i got back to fordham that fall i got in and i changed my major once again for the last time and in the years that followed just as that woman prophesies i have traveled the world and i have spoken to millions of people through my movies millions who up until this day couldn't see me who up till this day i couldn't see while i was talking to them and they couldn't see me they could only see the movie they couldn't see the real me but i see you today and i'm encouraged by what i see and i'm strengthened by what i see and i love what i see the word yoga means union union means whether you are aware of it or you are not aware of it right now you are happening here as a part of everything else what the trees exhale your inhaling what you exhale the trees are inhaling not just on the level of respiration on all levels this is happening what you think as myself is just a psychological boundary that you have set up so yoga means consciously obliterating the boundaries of your individuality so if you sit here if you experience everything around you as myself this is yoga if you experience all this as myself do you need morality be good to people don't harm them don't do this don't do that would it be necessary no did anybody teach you out of these five fingers this is a small finger don't cut it off is this a morality needed like that anything that you feel is a part of yourself with that you don't need any values ethics morals nothing because it's a part of you this is what yoga means you experience everything as a part of you when somebody experiences the whole universe as a part of himself then we say he's a yogi charles darwin said that you evolved out of a monkey you were a monkey then you became a man some of the genetic scientists are saying this that the difference the dna difference between a chimpanzee and you is only 1.23 percent so in that sense physiologically you're only 1.23 away from a chimpanzee not a big difference isn't it a shade it's just a shade of difference but in terms of intelligence and awareness you are worlds apart from a chimpanzee so your problem is just this you have an intelligence for which you don't have a stable enough platform and that's why yoga to create a stable platform so that your intelligence works for you right now you may call it so many things so many exotic names have come up stress tension anxiety depression madness all kinds of things all this essentially what it means is your intelligence has turned against you that's all you can give any number of reasons but essentially your intelligence has turned against you if your intelligence was working for you would you create blissfulness or misery this all why your intelligence is turned against you there's no stable enough base so the entire yogic system is about this that you create a stable base so that your intelligence works for you if your intelligence turns against you no power in the universe is going to save you you are a done thing if you become what you make up unfortunate isn't it yeah your thoughts belong to you or you belong to the thoughts you must make up your mind [Music] they can be dangerous those thoughts they're not dangerous they're fantastic only thing is fantastic things mishandled can kill you a car can kill you isn't it it's a wonderful thing an automobile it's made our lives if you handle it irresponsible it kills you every possibility is like this every possibility if you do not harness it it becomes a problem so the same goes for your cerebral capability if you do not harness it it's a serious problem [Music] it's taking away 80 percent of the human beings are simply suffering they don't need any outside help they're on self-help to understand when i say i'm thinking this you another word another way of saying it is i'm making up this i'm making up that you can make up whatever you want as long as you enjoy it to transform your life you want to do it in two minutes so is that what your life is worth so if your life is worthwhile is it not important that you invest a certain amount of time and energy rather than looking for this stupid stuff of one mantra with which i will transform my life it will not happen like that that's the reason why most people have remained the way they have remained because they have not invested in their well-being so it's a serious long-term investment it is not long term i would say if i ask you is your life worthwhile enough to invest 30 to 32 hours of focused time to bring some basic transformation within you if i teach you a way where you can manage your chemistry the way you want but we need 32 hours of focused time do you think your life is valuable enough for that much investment i'm asking yes then you must invest that's what is called an engineering program it's 32 hours of focus time we can format it in different ways but that much investment has to go in see all human experience comes from within isn't it i don't know what kind of geniuses start these things i know in america there must be a million books telling you how to uh you know milk happiness from something else or somebody else but all human experiences generated from within what comes from within you must be the way you want it isn't it isn't that simple enough i'm asking what comes from around you may not be the way you want it but what comes from within you must be the way you want it if whatever happens within you the way you want it will you be blissed out or miserable blissed out see most people understand complexity has intelligence if they make themselves difficult they are supposed to be intelligent making a simple thing difficult is not intelligence making a very complex thing simple is intelligence isn't it so wrong sense of intelligence idea of intelligence has entered people's minds they think if they make a problem out of every solution they're intelligent no no if you find solutions for every problem that is intelligence that's my understanding so essentially this whole this whole attitude and questioning and this kind of thing has happened to the world in a big way because our education is confusing people to make them believe that memory is intelligence memory is not intelligence memory is useful as data but intelligence is a different dimension we have gobbled this up that we have made children believe from a very early age if you remember something you are smart no no a tape recorder can remember everything this camera can remember everything this doesn't mean it's intelligent so one major aspect of my work is to separate these two in your within your experience your memory and your intelligence are two different things if you have an intelligence which unsullied by memory you will see everything just the way it is but if you look at everything through the filters of your memory everything is prejudiced people who are all this is fine but what's the takeaway they want a commandment we are talking about consciousness commandments won't fly commandments means you're trying to fix your life consciousness means you want to liberate your life my intention is you must liberate your life people come and say satguru please teach us how to control my mind say you want your mind controlled or liberated oh yes yes liberated but how to control because they think that intelligence is a serious problem and it's been in their lives so what is the solution if you remove a part of your brain you will be fine you're essentially complaining i wish i had the brain of an earthworm this human brain i am not able to handle yes that is a fact we have come to a place where to grow our food we need chemicals to be healthful we need chemicals today 70 of the population is on prescription medication of some sort to be peaceful we need chemicals to be joyful we need chemicals to be ecstatic of course you have ecstasy [Music] so we are going towards chemicals in a huge way the water that you drink is full of chemicals the air that you breathe is like that and the food that you eat is like that so if 90 of humanity goes into chemical consumption consciously or unconsciously if they consume a lot of it the next generation that we produce will be of a lesser quality than who we are that's a crime against humanity what i'm saying is the important thing about life whether it's a grasshopper out there or you both of us are striving to be the fullest possible life that we can be a grasshopper is trying to be a full-fledged grasshopper a human being is trying to be a full-fledged human being so suppose you cut off one of grasshopper's legs which supposed to hop the hopping leg if you take it off have you enhanced its life i'm asking you no so similarly for a human being if you take away any of his faculties in any way even temporarily have you enhanced his life now so intoxication is just that it is taking away your faculties for a period of time but if you continuously do it it will take it away for your life so you're taking away or subjugating your faculties for a little bit of pleasure or maybe a lot of pleasure whatever you wish to describe it but the important thing is you're taking a backward step with life because life can only be enhanced by sharpening and increasing our faculties not by decreasing our faculties our ability to be active physically mentally emotionally spiritually if this is in any way crippled this means we are taking a backward step though there may be pleasure attached to it every human being wants his life enhanced if you don't show them proper ways to enhance they will find shortcuts see a man who goes to the bar and a man who goes to a church or a temple or whatever they're seeking the same thing they're trying to enhance their life isn't it if you do not show them a proper way they will take whatever ways are available on the street that's all that's why i'm saying it's not a moral issue for me it is just that it sets you backward you want to go forward but it sets you backward most people can't concentrate because they've never been taught how to concentrate and they don't practice it so if we don't learn to concentrate and we don't practice it or obviously you can't practice something you haven't learned then how can you be good at it and what we practice all the time is distraction so the more you practice distraction the better you become at it and people are masters at distraction people think technology is distracting you know i've had so many people come up to me hold their cell phones up into my face and go these things are ruining our lives and i go no these things are not ruining our life this is a beautiful piece of technology what's ruining your life is your inability to exercise discipline around the use of it so the idea is that you use technology as opposed to technology uses you in the same way you know if you look at your whole day how do we integrate the practice of concentration throughout everything that we do the one way i tell people to practice concentration is doing one thing at a time so giving someone your undivided attention is a great way to practice concentration every time i speak with my wife i give her my undivided attention my awareness drifts away i bring my awareness back to her and i stay focused on that conversation the two things we need to understand there's the mind and there's awareness and you're not the mind rather you're pure awareness moving through different areas of the mind so your mind doesn't move rather your awareness is moving through the mind so when i'm speaking with my wife if i'm getting distracted it's my awareness is leaving her and it's moving to a different area of the mind i might be thinking about a client or contract i need to sign a business opportunity and then i bring my awareness back to her we keep chatting for a minute and then my awareness drifts away again and i bring my awareness back so i define concentration as my ability to keep my awareness on one thing for an extended period of time until i can consciously choose to move it to another thing so if i'm speaking with you i give you my undivided attention i keep my awareness on you every time it drifts away i bring it back it drips away i bring it back and i train myself and i think that's where you know people in today's world i feel so many people are lazy and they want a quick fix because everything that's being sold to them is a quick fix you know you only need to do so many hours before you get certified as a yoga teacher you can come to the weekend course to enlightenment that's a one-week seminar to understand mind-body connection i'm like what bs i have 10 years of my life learning this and the way my teacher taught me was just like wax on wax off just one little thing at a time a relentless practice you first you understand how it works then you learn how to practice it and then you just repeat that mindlessly till it becomes numb and everybody wants new things right they're tired it's like i'm done with part one can you give me part two what's next you know it becomes like cocaine everybody wants to learn but nobody practices anything and they think by learning something you're actually maturing or becoming wiser no learning doesn't make you wiser if you don't implement anything that you're learning so people are going from one course to another to another to another and then people in my industry the self-help industry that's how they make the money right it keeps selling you you know over and over again and you just keep buying and you think you're learning and growing but you're not because you don't even practice the first thing you do you're taught so for me the first thing you want to learn is concentration because if you can't concentrate you can't solve problems you can't be better at what you do how can you be a great athlete how can you be a great singer an artist a scientist a doctor if you can't stay focused long enough to gain mastery over the topic where awareness goes energy flows and a simple analogy i always tell people to look at awareness as a glowing ball of light your awareness is a glowing ball of light that's floating through the mind and you can control where it goes in those different areas of the mind there's an angry area of the mind as a healthy area of the mind as a science and sex and food and photography and if your awareness is going to a particular area of the mind that's where energy is flowing because where awareness goes energy flows and energy is like water if whatever i water will start to grow right so if i took a watering can and i watered a garden bed with the weeds grow or the flowers grow both right because water can't tell the difference energy works the same way if i put energy to a particular area of my mind it will start to grow so if i want to develop a particular area of the mind all i need to do is harness my awareness take it to that area of the mind and hold it there long enough so there's enough energy going to that area and that area starts to get strengthened and and different people cultivate different areas of the mind some people are happy they're always happy they're always an optimist because that's where the awareness is going and because awareness goes there energy flows there more energy is deposited there more energy deposit there means more magnetic which means it pulls awareness there much easier the mind basically has no ability to tell what's good for you and what's not good for you if the mind actually knew we'd all be perfect i'd wake up in the morning my mind would tell me meditate for an hour do yoga run work out eat this breakfast then sit down for two hours or one hour then stretch then do this no my mind just like do whatever the hell you want to do the mind doesn't know right so whatever we tell our mind whatever we repeat over and over in our mind creates patterns and these patterns when they're repeated whether they're repeated consciously or unconsciously become deeply ingrained and become extremely difficult to break he said learn to lean on your own spine and in the monastery that i lived in there were 27 months and you know the 52 years he taught he he had 27 months when he died so it wasn't easy to get in he was a tough teacher a very loving wise teacher and wasn't easy to stay in but you know the one thing he always said to us is that don't lean on me because one day when i die you're gonna fall over learn to lean on your own spine and i think in today's world people lean on so many things right whether it's drugs or technology and we just complicate things right for for thousands of years i believe people learn to become sensitive to their mind their body and their nervous system and that's how we survived on this planet all over the world whether it was in europe africa asia people went out to the forest they knew what leaf or root a plant healed something and that's how we survived right there was no doctor or pharmacy to go to we understood our body we knew how to connect with plants with things we were sensitive enough and now in today's world we are the most amazing tool on the planet our body and our mind but yet we don't try to understand it ourselves we need technology to tell us about our body we need other things to tell us about our mind right get to know your mind get to know your body so that you can understand it and we have the most amazing tool in the world yet we turn to other things like technology and drugs and everything why just go within yourself and find out all answers are inside of you so one common thing people say to me is done party if i meditate five minutes a day in the morning will that help me concentrate two things here one is meditation doesn't help you concentrate this is a total false uranus belief concentration leads to meditation you cannot meditate unless you can concentrate so meditation doesn't help you concentrate second is look at it this way your whole day is a preparation at first your rituals throughout the day is what supports you then you start meditation all right you can't meditate for five minutes a day and then the rest of the day practice distraction don't lead a life that supports meditation my guru had a beautiful saying and he quite often would say that you know most people can't meditate because they do not lead a life that supports the practice of meditation one of the brilliant things about my teacher was that he proved to us and showed us that technology and material things are not bad there's nothing wrong with tv there's nothing wrong with the cell phone there's nothing wrong with computers there's nothing wrong with the internet as long as you are in charge but if you allow the internet whatever's happening on your computer on your phone to dictate your awareness in your mind then you become a slave to technology and then it can train you to be distracted but as long as you're in charge of it then it's totally fine what beautiful tools huh i can pick up my phone and facetime my mom in australia i can see her i can talk to her i can smile and laugh why is that a bad thing but i need to be in charge of my phone and i think in today's world we allow everything on the phone everything on the computer on the internet to dictate where awareness is going and therefore we become a slave to everyone and everything around us problems are not problems the subconscious patterns that need to be adjusted and i love that saying problems are not problems the subconscious patterns that need to be adjusted once you understand that all you have to do is adjust patterns in your subconscious and you can change so much in your life because so much of the patterns in there were either placed in there by you or your surroundings your family your school what you watch on tv what you listen to your environment program to subconscious so if you can adjust those patterns to what you want you solve the problem i think at the end of the day is all about desire how badly do you want it and most people to be honest with you don't want it badly enough and when my guru asked me when i told him i wanted enlightenment or self-realization he asked me what are you willing to do for it and i said i'm willing to give up my life so i was willing you know in my early 20s when all my friends were graduating from engineering school with me they were going out and parties and shagging women and getting drunk and you know earning money buying a car getting an apartment and traveling the world i said no because i wanted something more not that i didn't think those things were great i wanted something more and i think today you know how many people really want to be concentrated i would say there's so many incentives for concentrating right benefits for concentration number one is that ultimately i would like to think that most people want to be happy i think very few people wake up and say i want to be miserable today most people want to be happy how do you be happy first you become clear of what you want in life you identify your purpose in life you identify who and what is important in your life your purpose defines your priorities once you identify who and what's important in your life then when you're doing what you love when you're spending time with the people that you love how do you get the most out of it so if you love going to the gym and working out for an hour how do you get the most out of it you get the most out of it by being able to be concentrated while you're doing that so if i'm if i love spending time with my best friend and having a glass of wine with him and sitting with him for an hour and chatting gives me tons of joy and that's a priority in my life the only way i can get the most out of the experience is learning how to concentrate if i can give him or her my undivided attention for an hour i can get the most out of that experience the byproduct of that is i feel happiness right at the end of the day if you really want to have a life that's a happy life you really have to be clear who and what's important in your life and in doing those things you have to be fully present and the only way to be fully present so that you can fully experience those experiences is to be able to be concentrated your brain is the most powerful weapon in the world once you put away your phones and your computers and all that we have nowadays that's great we're up to date you know you but your brain is the only thing you have when you're going through depression when you're going through hard times you're going through death real life you can't google that man you're alone you're alone you may have a shrink you're going to you may have a best friend you're going to but there's 24 hours in the day where you're alone in this brain and your brain is talking to you in all kinds of ways and it wants to control you and pull you in these different pockets if you can't control your own brain and your brain controls you you got to tell your brain where you want to go and how you want to go and how you want to get there you got to control it if not it's over what existed for me was okay man how am i going to make this work and and all i knew back then was hard work the only way anything gets accomplished that's all i heard back in those days you got to work hard you got to work hard i'm not getting how to i can't get this paragraph i can't remember what the [ __ ] in this paragraph to pass this test to get in the military read again still not getting it read again but if not getting it write it out and that's how i started learning okay well i can't i gotta write out everything i do and then write it out again and write out again and guess what happened i got it i got it i can't swim i'm negative buoyant go back again i can't swim go back again go back again go back again i got it i realized if i keep going back and going back and going back until the sh just becomes your mind was safe okay we're gonna figure it out because he is not going to stop it's not like i'm gonna try one more time no i'm gonna it's just like alarm clock goes off boop we're going back i can't read right we're going back i gave myself no way out in my mind realized that they said okay we're going to adapt and overcome now like a lot of people say trying hard they your mind knows man you know this guy's [ __ ] man this guy's lying there's no truth behind it when i was in navy still training people how are you there for 18 months the program is only six months long you were in three hell weeks in one year no one's ever done that how did you do that i talked about the new norm when i lived in a seven dollar a month place when i was growing up for a short period of time i loved it i didn't know you i i knew any different that was my norm once we moved out of that place we moved to a 236 dollar a month place i was like i never want to go back to that little piece of but if you go back to that 7 month place and you realize this is where i live that's all i got your mind says roger that this is home so when i was going to navy seal training for 18 months and going back to all the hard parts over and over again i told myself after the first time i knew it was gonna be a long journey there my body was breaking down it was it was just how it was going on i said you know what this is my new norm so my mind said it's like going to work like you go to work you put your suit and tie on i go into suffering every day every day suffering being broken duct taping my feet up stress fractures shin splints being broken this is my new norm and your mind says if we're not broken this ain't normal we got to be broken so then your mind starts to get tougher and tougher and more cows people how how did you run on broken feet broken broken shins my mind knew this is how we operate we're in we're navy still training this is where we are i became hell and that became my new norm i gave myself no way out there was nothing outside these walls of hell nothing i became i love god but for a short period of time i became the devil because that was hell i became i became the boss the owner the ceo of navy seal training that was my mindset and that's how you get through things you put yourself you immerse yourself in wherever it is you become that you become that and give yourself no way out when i was 297 pounds and i was fat as hell trying to be a navy seal the scariest thing in the world to me even to this day was that that could have been the rest of my life i thought then i was trying hard that's the scariest thing in the world i thought then 297 pound working for eco lab spraying for cockroaches making a thousand dollars a month i thought that was me at my 100 potential coming to find out a few years later i wasn't anywhere near that 106 pounds less graduate navy still training went on to do all these other things looking back on that that was me trying hard that's why people gotta understand what is in us we have no idea until we start trying hard and i mean really trying hard where you're obsessed with hey this is my new norm my new norm is that wow this isn't always fun it's not always meant to be fun and that's when you know you're trying hard people hear my story and think this guy is sadistic i realize how the how the brain works i figured out how the brain works i i'm a scared kid and that's what gives me so much power i had no foundation and i built this off of just researching the mind the feeling you get is basically invincibility you realize that you can't do it all the time when you need to do it i know i can go to a place that i can live in and when you know that you can run on broken legs and you can do certain things that a lot of people can do but they're not willing to do this power this sympathetic nervous system of fight or flight in your fighting it gives you this charge of energy of when you're sitting there at 3 30 4 o'clock in the morning and you're duct taping your feet up because they're broken and you're doing it by yourself and you're going through arguably one of the hardest training in the world and these guys most of them are healthy and you're going through it broken and you already at a disadvantage but you're still there you can feed into that and tap into that for a lot of power but if you look at it well i'm broken man like i'm not gonna make it but if you look at it as man i'm broken and i'm still here and i'm fighting and i'm gonna find a way to get through this because i have no other place to go it gives you a lot of power when things start to suck really really bad my brain in a lot of people's brains they don't go to your dad beating you up your brain says we are out of here this is miserable so anger goes away a lot of times when you're suffering because your brain just says we gotta run we gotta go so that anger is not popping up saying oh i wanna show them i wanna show those people no there has to be a much deeper if i say deeper it has to be down to mineral mineral soil it has to be down to that nice mineral soil where nothing can burn you can't burn dirt so it has to be down that low that literally is something in you that's at the core of your soul and but you but you don't find it unless you spend a lot of time with what you want to be in life you i i can't give that to you right you can't give it to somebody when when you find your true passion in life and my passion for me when like oh i want to be that and give navy seals army around i want to serve my country i cared about i want to be someone that i'm proud of i want to look at myself in the mirror because i was so disappointed that accountability where i talk about i was so disappointed in what i saw every day i wanted everybody to love david goggins and a lot of people did i didn't love myself but i knew a lot of us want to find peace first some people say man you always talk about this suffering and pain and i'm at peace right now because i went through that right you don't find peace first if you do merry christmas more power to you more power to you i found peace on the opposite end of finding myself and no one really finds himself without going through trials tribulations suffering accountability and accountability is suffering being accountable every day for doing right for yourself for the people next to you it's miserable it's hard so you know even the smallest details most of what people care about can be thought of as a skill i mean well-being is is a skill not suffering unnecessarily is a skill regulating noticing your emotional life and regulating negative emotion is a skill [Music] the moment you begin practicing mindfulness which is just just learning to pay close attention to the nature of your experience you're not adding anything to your experience you're just noticing what it's like to be you moment to moment but in a way that is not reactive you're not grasping at what's pleasant or pushing what's unpleasant away you're just going to make this concrete and let's say you have a fear of public speaking right so you about to go down out on stage and you feel anxiety the default state of someone who doesn't want to have that experience is one to you know in advance worry about that experience and the anxiety is kindled just by the mere thought of what you have to do then once you feel the butterflies you are at war with them right you contract your mind contracts around it like i see people do this all the time they're they're relaxed i'm unhappy you know when am i and you're you're talking to yourself you're not noticing it because your the thoughts just come up from behind you as fast as as they can and they seem to be you right you're identified with each thought that emerges in consciousness and most people live their lives as though there's no alternative we're not given a rule book for how to operate a human mind right and there's no place in a normal education where we're uh where it's even indicated that there's an alternative here and so we get we kind of stumble out into adulthood more or less assuming that we have we'll always have the minds we have and that really there's you know we the only thing we can do to really upgrade our firmware is to just add new content you know we can read books we can we can develop interests but there's nothing at the sort of root level of our emotional and cognitive life that can change and so mindfulness is a way of kind of dropping a little bit lower and realizing so in this case if you're feeling anxiety there's actually a place from which you can just feel it right and and be actually indifferent to it or anything else you could be feeling i mean just just notice that there's even an unpleasant sensation but first you can notice that anxiety isn't even that unpleasant it's so close to excitement in its actual physiology that really the difference between excitement and anxiety is more or less just the the framing it's just the story you're telling yourself you know if you felt these these tingles and this you know slightly adrenalized response right before you know you're about to go on a roller coaster that's part of why you're going on the roller coaster you like that experience right but the fact that you feel that way when you're about to have an interview or you're about to you know walk out on stage that's intolerable right so just dropping back and realizing the the power of the framing is again this is a skill that is a fairly esoteric one but now you know many people are learning it you know the secrets out and it has immense utility because then you can realize that the the half-life of negative emotions is incredibly short i mean one you could you can actually be psychologically free even in their presence right your your freedom and your well-being isn't even predicated on getting rid of the physiology right like it can still be there but if you're not continually thinking about all the reasons why you should be anxious the physiology dissipates very very quickly and that's true for anger it's true for anything that is classically negative now if we're talking about a clinical depression it's it's useful to say that there's a physiology to this that you know can be driven from below in a way that's not narrowly responsive to their thinking right so it'll tend to produce depressive thoughts and the depressive thoughts will tend to feed back on the state and everything else that is good to do that people sort of lose their commitment to doing at the worst possible time should be done i mean you have to sort of get behind yourself and push to exercise and to socialize and to do things that you you may not want to do because those are good for you and help you know break and can break you out of it but the normal range of psychological suffering you know not clinical depression but just feeling like you know life sucks and you're a failure and there's nothing you know it's like you're just it's you're stuck that is a story of telling yourself a story you're thinking and you can either become more and more mindful of that and interrupt that more and more uh and or and it should be and you can reframe this continually and tell yourself a better story you can actually just engineer you know you can change the code that you're that you're you know uh running moment to moment and i mean just you know a very simple one which i you know i use and i actually recently recorded this in a lesson on the app you know just gratitude just thinking this is actually you know this particular maneuver is i believe comes from stoic philosophy i i didn't actually get it from stoic philosophy but this this sort of use of negative imagination where you think of all of the bad things that haven't happened to you right so if you're just you know if you're stuck in traffic driving to the job that you don't like and you're you're frustrated uh you can think of all the things that could happen to you right that haven't and if any one of them happened to you you would consider your prayers answered if you could just be returned to this moment right like you haven't been diagnosed with cancer right you've got two young kids say you know you want to live to see them grow up and you could be the guy who today is going to find out you've got two months to live right and you have to then the next two months is spent just unwinding your worldly affairs right you're not that guy right that hasn't happened to you yet that's just more thinking but it can have a profound effect you can you can reframe your experience in a way that doesn't actually change anything material about your circumstance and it can let the light in the generic situation we want to find ourselves in more and more is to effortlessly cooperate with creative and happy strangers right now there's seven billion of us we need institutions and laws and norms and ways of thinking that take the friction out of pleasurable and non-paranoid interaction with strangers it's not just about having you know five or so close friends who's got who have your back right i mean like clearly we're all on the same team on some basic level and if we can't figure out how to build a civilization where everyone thrives to some degree will have the world we currently have until it becomes unsustainable because we're in a situation now where i think it's reasonable to worry that our default state of partisanship and tribalism and rational fear of the incompatible aims of you know other groups and other people is unsustainable in the presence of more and more destructive technology i just think i think we have to get our act together psychologically and socially in a way that we haven't yet it may be useful to have a slightly delusional self-serving bias right to think you're coming off better than you are like it may give you more enthusiasm for your life and more confidence but anything that's too out of register is just delusion right and other people notice and other people treat you like somebody who's just not tracking in a reality and so i think we want our beliefs to be true in some basic sense and therefore we want to be open to new evidence and better arguments perpetually right because if you're if you close yourself off if you say well listen i'm done i'm done thinking about reality and i know what's true then again when more data comes in you know when something surprising when one of your intuitions proves to be faulty if you can't error correct again you're just going to fall out of alignment with what's going on in the world and what with what other people think is true as well so the really the only mechanism we have to do that is human conversation we have to be open to having other people point out errors in our thinking and we have you know in and in the conversation we have with ourselves we have to do likewise [Music] don't tell people what they what you know keep them poor but you know unfortunately the poor will always be amongst us because it starts up here it's it's in their words you know and the words become flesh but when they say i can't afford it or i can't do that they become what they say and i made so many people i don't i can't afford it you think i made him money my phd daddy says what do you think i am made of money i can't afford that and my rich dad would say that's why he's poor poor people say i can't afford it i can't do that i don't have time because this is escape it's an escape you know i mean it's easy to say i can't afford it oh like i'm too tired oh i can't go to the gym when you could go to the gym but no i can't truth is i'm just too lazy to go to the gym a question opens a mind a statement closes the mind see when you say i can't afford it your mind shuts down and you become what you say but the thing is is that we become creatures of our own habits and until we break the habit we don't change poverty is passed on it's taught in your families and middle classes taught in families and so the people right now who are sitting at home who are struggling financially or worried about money or unhappy they may be making a lot of money but unhappy with what they're doing it was probably taught to you you know your super ego was taught get a job work hard or or you'll never be rich or the rich or evil or whatever if you're poor you'll always be poor just like most pro athletes you know they make millions of dollars and what 65 percent are bankrupt five years later it's because they come from poorer families now you tell them that they get very angry at you it's not it's a rich fault you know as you guys ripped me off and government ripped me off but unfortunately it's passed down genetically that's the frightening thing we've got to change what we teach our kids so i remember raising my hand when i was nine years old talking to my my fourth grade teacher i said you know what am i going to learn about money she says the love of money is the root of all evil we'd all teach money at school i said why not and she couldn't answer me and she got very flustered she says go ask your father he said he's my boss my father was the head of education phd all that stuff i go home and ask him so why don't we learn about money in school [Music] and he looked at me he says because the government doesn't let us teach that subject the government tells us what we can teach and what we can't teach and i thought that was strange and i said but why aren't we going to school to learn about money he says no your job is to get a job i said but you get a job to earn money he goes no you're supposed to get a job i'm going no no no no no isn't the purpose of a job to earn money he goes you're correct i said so why don't i just learn about money i can skip the job part you know and he got flustered and he said look if you want to learn about money why don't you ask your best friend's father about money so i ask him he says because mike's father is an entrepreneur and i said what am what are you he says i'm an employee i'm a government employee i went oh what's the difference this is the difference is an entrepreneur must know about money or that they're no longer entrepreneurs and he says an employee doesn't have to know anything about money because the government will take care of the company will take care of money on one condition and that condition was he would never pay me he says the moment i pay you you think like an employee he says that's the trap entrepreneurs work for free and now i'm nine years old my head's going cracking in half he says you never want a paycheck you understand that kid he said okay i got it and he said well how do i make money he says that's what entrepreneurs figure out you know it's like it's like it's the cat you know what just comes first a cat where the you know the cat chasing his tail i said so how do i learn about money so he would just break out a monopoly game board so i would work for free and pick up cigarette butts and get hotels and restaurants and i would clean and do menial tasks and as i got older i started getting into office work and marketing and accounting and i was an apprentice basically but i always work for free he says the moment you accept the paycheck your brain goes dead as long as you're hungry you'll think and he was a great great teacher you see most teachers in school they're out of ethics they teach subjects they don't they themselves don't practice a fake teacher is somebody who just wants a job and they'll teach anything you know they teach how to shine shoes if you paid on more money but they really don't know what they're teaching for example my calculus teacher i was at went to military school in new york and i asked the teacher i said you know i'm in my third year of calculus now i said am i ever going to use this stuff he goes no you know i said why do you teach it because i get paid said do you ever use it he goes no and that's why you know i you have to in life one of the things i suggest to people you got to find a real teacher versus a fake teacher and a fake teacher is somebody doesn't do what they teach and a real teacher is doing what they teach every day school systems are making our students weaker so in school they have these things called now triggering effects so you can't as a teacher you can't say anything that might upset the student they don't want anything that might jar their point of view so if i went into school i'd be thrown out because i threatened them you know and to me isn't school about opening your eyes and minds to new ideas but that's now out of the system so everybody's going to be pc you know politically correct now and it's killing us it's killing the brains of our kids they're going backwards but in their minds they're more enlightened if i didn't have ideas that shook me i wouldn't learn anything new but now these trigger tricker mechanisms we're actually making our students weaker in school my success comes from spirituality not finance you see people say well why don't you give the poor money so the only problem with that is just creates more poor people you give a man a fish you get a lot of people want more fish you know but you teach them to fish we're more antagonistic more anti-social you know social media is anti-social that's the danger part so the reason i'm speaking on spirituality we got to evolve you know it means meditation if it means yoga means praying means going to church whatever it takes but you got to get back to calm and peace and meditation one generalized principle is emergence through emergency so when you look at the word emergency the base word is emerge the only way humans evolve is via emergency a big one's coming and it's gonna be as we all know our banks have ripped us off immensely there's just a bunch of crooks i don't know how they can live with themselves but you know the bankers rip off trillions they get bonus in billions nobody goes to jail that's sickness of our society so that's when i write about financial education it's almost like self-defense it's almost like taking judo against our own government and our own banking systems and wall street people who are afraid of making mistakes like they teach in school they don't ever grow because spirituality is there's good and there's bad there's right and there's wrong there's up and there's down most people only want to be right they only want to be positive well you can't have that that's not reality every time i failed it was like good it's okay what have i learned and the average person the reason they're poor is they haven't failed you know they play it so safe they haven't made any mistakes like they taught in school that means they don't learn anything that's why the school system is actually fundamentally corrupt it's anti-education don't make mistakes and don't ask for help and if i didn't ask for help i have my accountants my attorneys my bankers and all that you know i go into business like a rugby team you know boom boom we kick butt but the average guy is standing there oh i'm an a student i'm going to do this all on myself and a bunch of rugby players run you over and you go well they're not playing fair you know what you're not you're playing stupid you should have a team you have accounts attorneys and bankers and all that stuff but that's not the game i want to play i said then don't play the game so what i say to young people is you find your game so i'm not here to tell you don't do this do that don't do that do this i'm here to change the way you think and if i can change the way you think i can't help but change what you do can i let me introduce you to the concept of success ben franklin was a pretty smart guy and i want to start with a quote by him if you do tomorrow what you did today you will get tomorrow what you got today you want to know what that means the average american makes between three and five percent more each year that's the deal and in today's economy i'm not sure we're gonna make the three to four to five percent next year as employees so it takes you 20 years to double your income in america as an average person that's the mediocrity that we're stuck in in life and then you meet people who have the uncanny ability to double their income in a year to get promoted five times in a year the ones that beat the system the ones that conquer it you've all seen them haven't you the difference between them and the ones that don't do that is that they wake up in the morning and they think differently they understand that if i do tomorrow what i did today i'm gonna get tomorrow what i got today you want a bigger car how about a nice house in tahiti sure would you love a nice house in the hills we all want better things don't we we all want more friends more stuff more money more security more travel more enjoyment if you do the same thing tomorrow that you did today you're stuck stuck and it doesn't change and it grows a little at a time and you get a taste of success but it's never fast enough it never excites you and when it does it's a good month or a good two months or a good three months but it doesn't provide a trajectory that creates success [Music] so the first thing i want you to think about today is i want you to wake up tomorrow and do something different and understand if you do the same damn thing you're stuck just because you did it a certain way yesterday there's no reason to do it that way today i want it to hit hard that's not what drives success you do [Music] there's no place for patience in business you know patience in life means things happen slower than they could so if you're going to be on this planet for 70 years and things happen slower than they should at the end of 70 years you're going to have less aren't you less experiences less time less money less of everything so let's all hurry up man and get more out of life if you think your life is complete then i suggest that you're an ass because tomorrow always has a great opportunity in it your life is not complete until you close your eyes so when you say somebody who's in a job they hate would love to be able to do this my comment is why the hell are you in a job you hate don't you have the courage to leave it so you're in a job you hate you're doing nothing to change it but you like better sometimes i have to do that i have miles to feed i sometimes i get it but what were the things about you listen we'd have to go over those specific cases i think and really getting into each person to break them but what do you think that were the things about you one of it is you always had your eyes open to tomorrow and new opportunities what were some of the other things as part of your personality for because i've there aren't many people like you but i've seen and i'm studying more and more people where amazing things are happening at 55 and 60 and putting them on life journeys that they never thought they were going to have and i'm and i'm seeing that you guys have a lot of similar attributes but what do you think what was it about you john courage courage you know the first time i went and shot a pilot for bar rescue was really hard you think it's easy to scream at people on national television to insult people on national television to call you a jerk challenge your marriage challenge your challenge your integrity challenge your professionalism that's hard that's not who i am i don't wake up and embarrass people in front of their friends right in front of their family bar rescue is the hardest work i have ever done the courage that it takes for me to go out there and do these things the only final advice i would give you is i've lived a very unconventional life and it's because i live my dream every day dreams are inspiring work is not find a dream dreams make this world go on it built our whole country and when we get in a rut as human beings is when we lose touch with our dreams we lose the ability to fight for those dreams so don't be an employee of google live your dreams at google find a way to you know match your dreams with the goals of your company and your own work because there's nothing worse than when you see somebody who lost touch with their dreams you wake up in the morning you're failing so you blame the president you blame congress you blame greece blame the euro i mean you construction in the street it's the mayor oh and you wake up in the morning and you look in the mirror and you're not failing because it's the other guy's fault was the economy's fault but if you looked in a mirror and said i'm failing because of me you wouldn't like it and you changed that and i believe the common denominator of failure in any business is excuses as long as you wake up and blame poor sales on the economy or an environment then you have no motivation to make it better because it's not your fault but in the worst economic environment four or five years ago in this country that we've seen in our lifetimes there were people making a lot of money weren't there in the height of that recession are people selling advertising people opening restaurants people building businesses somebody's making money so the excuse is bull it's ball so wake up in the morning and own your failure look in the mirror and say i'm failing because of me and you won't like it and then you'll change it but as long as you don't put it on you you have no motivation to change it so in short if you own your failure you'll own your success if you don't own your failure you'll never dig out and i find that in any business always the common denominator of failure personally is excuses you don't want to be a failure do you not at all don't want to look in the mirror and experience that if you can't blame anybody but yourself you're going to change you're going to fight it out that's the deal i have a dear friend who works for a large company and he wants to open a franchise by franchise of sandwich stores so he meets with me he says john i need some advice do i leave my long-standing job and benefits and do this or do i admit so why can't you have your cake you need to tell right why can't you bring in a partner why can't you bring in somebody to do it there's ways to get there it doesn't have to be absolute so if somebody wants to create a second career create new opportunities in their life figure out a way to do it without risking what you have right and if you want it enough you'll figure it out i de-est my way into jobs that i didn't have the experience to do and pulled it off but i had to believe in myself to bs my way into it i knew i could figure it out too and that gave me the confidence to show up at the interview and convince that guy to hire me because i was convinced myself that i could do it and that comes across you got to wake up in the morning and drive revenue which means you got to have the promotions the ideas the energy to elevate a business you got to be a rain maker in business or you're never going to get anyone wet and when they don't get wet they dry up and go away and it's that wetness of a rainmaker that filters down and trickles to everybody's success you have to drive the energy of revenue to be successful and when you do you'll have no expense problems i drive quality as a leader my systems maintain quality now with regard to new projects to me every new project is a ball and i have to move that ball every day so i know for example that i have four balls on my desk they might be five pads let's say five balls on my desk they might be five different pads five different books five different projects every day i'm gonna move those five balls that's the way i live my life and i can't go to sleep at night if i don't move every one of those five balls every day sometimes i have three balls sometimes i have seven balls but the amount of balls that i accept and put on my desk every one of them is going to move forward every day and i become relentless so i've learned to live my life based upon the progress i make on a daily basis and i believe that business is defined by what we do every day every single day and business is defined by the days that we have so if you move those five balls every day you can't help it be successful you will achieve it but you'll achieve it on a daily basis it's an interesting concept because you have to think about this why is it that you can give someone a sugar pill a saline injection or perform some false surgery or treatment and a certain percentage of those people will accept believe and surrender to the thought without any analysis that they're getting the real substance or real treatment and they begin to program their autonomic nervous system to make their own pharmacy of chemicals that matches the exact same chemical or treatment that they think they're getting now it says a few things number one it's not the external substance that's doing the healing because it's inert there's some type of innate capacity for the body to heal and there's some correlation between the mind and the body so that pill represents possibility for the person and so if you think about this when they see the pill they're conditioned into thinking that that pill can do something good for them so in a depression study for example three out of four people that are taking a placebo in a depression study get better now that's 75 which means that when that person sees the pill the pill represents hope a possibility for them they begin to select a new idea a new thought that they could be better a possibility it's called a clear intention some people will begin to become inspired enthusiastic excited and when you combine that clear intention with an elevated emotion you are changing a person's biology from living in the past to living in the future and they begin to make their own pharmacy of antidepressants it begins to help them now it's not a one-shot deal because in those studies for example the person who's taking the placebo has to take that pill for six weeks or eight weeks so every day then they're reminding themselves of a new future reality and that that pill represents a symbol it represents a symbol of hope a symbol of possibility and instead of them relating to themselves in a limited way that they have to resign to the idea that they can't think greater than how they feel in a depression study or feelings have become the means of thinking they're actually changing their physiology by thought alone and the redundancy and the repetition of that cycle begins to select different functions in the nervous system and your nervous system is the best pharmacy a drug producer in the world and begins to select new genes and and instruct new genes to cause a person's biology to begin to change and if you keep knocking on the genetic door there's a good possibility that you can program a gene or up regulate a gene to do something well and down regulate a gene to turn off and so my interest is in understanding how the placebo works how does it work once you understand how it works will you be able to teach it because do you need the sugar pill in order to move into a new state of being or can you teach a person to select an unknown instead of a known and continuously select that unknown and emotionally embrace that future before the event occurs so much so that the body is the unconscious mind begins to believe it's living in that future reality in the present moment and if the person does that just like taking the placebo for six weeks alters their state of being every single day is it possible that that unknown becomes known and they begin to change their physiology and biology just by thought alone you better be willing to have a new experience that is no longer a wishy-washy belief it has to be a very strong impression in your biology what comes with an accompanying experience that then changes your biology to understand you believe something else but that's not the end either because then you have to question from that point what is the next belief that helps you to understand the next thing for example the person in our work who i'll use a simple example has a very very difficult marriage and her marriage falls apart her husband was abusive and lived by the stress hormones for extended period of time of course all her energy is going for some threat in her external environment she has no energy in her internal environment for growth and repair no energy for long-term building projects the the body is in vigilance it's it's always anxious she's anticipating something bad happening all the time and she's got food allergies to everything she's allergic to her environment she comes to the event she does the work it takes her three months and all of a sudden in one event she has a breakthrough and she's eating anything she wants now she's changed her belief about her past because she's no longer saying i am this way because of my relationship with my husband because when you say i am this way because i had an abusive father i am this way because i had a difficult marriage i am this way because i got fired from my job what you're saying is i haven't changed since that event emotionally and so now you're viewing your future through the lens of the past when you overcome that emotional state a memory without the emotional charge is called wisdom now you're ready to create a new future because if you're still attached to the emotion you're still attached to the past and you can't create a future so all of a sudden now the person has a transformation she has a shift she knows that she knows that she's liberated from that anxiety she's she feels it and as a result of it in a matter of moments ben her biology reorganizes to a new mind and now she's eating i'm watching her eat pizza i'm watching rita hamburg she's laughing she's and it's and it's sustained but that's not the end because if she's healed herself then the next question is i understand the physics and biology of what i've done is it possible if i heal myself but i can heal another person if people are really really believing that their astrological sign determines their destiny then they will look for based on their perception the correlations that are equal to their belief system i don't particularly believe that because i'm born at a certain time under a certain house that has anything to do with me creating the life that i want to have right so many people will though and because they do they'll only they'll select like oh i saw 11 11 on the clock well well you've seen three 236 on the clock and 4 18 on the clock but you're looking for 11 11. well then that's your reality because that's where your attention is right so i don't subscribe to that but i respect that because that person is going to keep that belief until it no longer serves them and they're either going to evolve their belief or they're not and if they don't so be it but if they do they're going to realize sooner or later it's not working for them i have certain beliefs right now that i honestly am questioning that i still think are limited beliefs but in order for me to change those beliefs i'm going to have to come out of my resting state have to step out into the unknown and really check to see and execute in a very different way i can tell you that there is a strong majority of people who are still taking the placebo who are still making their changes because we know that like in a parkinson's study you give parkinson's patients a placebo and more than 50 percent of them their their intention tremors go away but if you take those people after they're making 200 times the amount of dopamine by getting a saline injection or an injection of distilled water they're making their own dopamine parkinson's is a deficiency in dopamine when they return back to their life and they see their caregiver and they play chess with their friends and they see their wife or sleep in the same bed or whatever it is their personal reality is creating their personality reminding them who they are their disease comes back because they're back to the same identity and that's how strong the environment is so our students who continue to do the work are still getting sustaining and producing more changes now that's the majority of our students because our students are committed but we do have students that don't make it why because this is a this we're doing something that is unknown we're doing something not everybody is going to make that like not everybody's going to finish the mile not everybody's gonna make the journey to the top of the mountain you know it's it's a it's a journey and so we ask people then uh the ones that have had chronic diseases or conditions the majority of them by the way are still doing exceptionally well some of them have had a disease return and what we have them do is measure every three months or six months you measure why because this is not about denial this is about knowing so with the people who have had some conditions return we ask them to measure and then we ask them to go at it again and if their values aren't changing we ask them to intervene with other medical means or whatever they need to improve so the ones that have had the healings though the majority of them are still doing exceptionally well some of them that stop taking the placebo or get start they lose their job they lose their mother they lose their life and they get stressed and they go back to the world itself well it's a matter of time when we're going to start seeing some of those conditions return what happens if you take a cold shower every day the heart rate is going to go down with 20 30 beats a minute 24 hours a day that means stress is gone if you take a couple of minutes and you make sure all the body adapts to the cold because you know you are very warm you're warm like a hot dog right in the when you wake up i go directly straight to the cold and get the biggest of reactions on my body and within 30 seconds or something i'm completely not feeling the cold anymore and then two minutes later i just finished it it's okay does it need anymore what the importance of that in the morning is that you wake up your vascular system and your vascular system is like two and a half times the world around in the length of the veins arteries and capillaries everybody has it and it contains millions of little muscles and they are trained if you go in and adapt to a cold shower a day and that way your vascular system is optimized and then your heart doesn't need to pump so much because all these millions of little muscles they help the blood flow go through and work with each other yes it's one closed system and the originator is the heart what happens if you take a cold shower every day the heart rate is gonna go down with 20 30 beats a minute 24 hours a day that means stress is gone this is what we do it's a horror matic exercising automatic stress exercising is a cold shower cold shower a day keeps the doctor away what happens more is that blood flow runs much better through the system the nutrients vitamins and minerals and oxygen they get better to the cells it produces more energy that's why everybody feels so energized directly after the cold shower because the system is getting better into feeding all the cells of ours which makes up molecules which is energy you feel more energy now because my vascular system is really trained i just take the cold shower and when i take my ice bath which is even more colder i say to the people i recommend two minutes but then very soon you are able to go five minutes and today you and me we go for 10 minutes because we're gonna set our mind the power of the mind is amazing this is what i've been showing the last study to be able to make my skin temperature not going down while ice water gets on the skin just by using the mind isn't that amazing and that means we are able to make stress go away just by using our mind and this is the result after so much training and exposing myself in into the court that i've learned to awaken direct connections in the brain that enables me just by thought to make the difference in my body whenever there is stress and that stress could be emotional physical bacterial virus stress mental stress daily stress stress and congestion stress is stress and you are able just by using your mind to deal with that type or any type of stress that that is the message you got oxidative stress and hormetic stress oxidative stress is negative that means that things you cannot handle and they get into the cell mechanisms and they have an absolute negative influence on the cell mechanisms and the mechanics and the telomeres the longevity the cell division the the dna and it produces wrong genome expressions which makes you sick or even cancer in the end a stress is like an attack on our healthy mechanisms and if we learn how to deal with stress the healthy mechanisms stay healthy that's the whole trick and this is what we do right now with in san francisco with 140 people with the top researchers on the dna to show how to protect the cell by exercising the cold showers and the breathing exercises exercises they are into positive stress activation which is hormatic stress and that makes the cell protected by proteins around the cell like little guards like little warriors who fend off viruses bacteria inflammation and oxidative stress so then the cell remains intact and the healthy production of the mechanics of the cell they are able to flourish and to keep on going it's amazing what we found because of me doing a study and i will show you the study the first study i i was staying like 80 minutes in ice up till here they took blood like 36 of tubes out of my arm while i was 80 minutes after my neck in ice and my core body temperature remained 37 degrees 80 minutes long and then they took the blood and the blood they injected e coli x vivo so i was not there but my blood was there and normally you have a very violent reaction of the immune cells on the e coli bacteria injected in the blood serum and now there was zero reaction they never had seen that and then they said can you do this when we inject you directly in your veins i said yeah hey let's try it out i think so but i did not became sick i did my breathing techniques i used my mind and i did not became sick i felt great and they saw that i was influencing directly at conscious will the autonomic nervous system thought of inaccessible in a medical scientific literature that humans are able to do that and i was showing the contrary so with that they said yeah but you are the iceman you are special you are different you are a freak of nature this is with normal people not possible then i told him yes give me people for 10 days and i will make them able what science is saying that is not possible with the human physiology at will i will make them able at will to influence so deep within their bodies and with that we will change medical literature as it is and they say okay finally they said yes let's do it and we did a comparative study with 18 people there who did not train with me and 18 people who i trained 12 of them were randomly chosen to take part of the injection of the e coli bacteria and all of them non-trained and trained the non-trained people they uh became all sick and the trained people after four only four days of training they did not became sick and then they saw sixteen thousand hundred and thirty-four people who had been exposed to the same experiment all became sick and then suddenly 12 people did 100 percent score in one comparative study showed not to become sick 100 score what i do always with people is to go to the mountains i have a house in poland somewhere at the mountain slopes and i trained the people over there every day inside and outside in the snow barefoot in shorts going to the waterfall and slowly but surely in four days climb a mountain in shorts for five hours in freezing temperatures and have a great time then uh when we arrived on the top of the mountain i knew these guys are ready let it come let the injection come off the bacteria they will show the difference and four days later they were in the hospital got the injection and they showed turned around scientific literary literature as it is we are able to do so much more than has been believed by science and scientific community and we have to bring this to the people i remember walking across this yard on what seemed to be a random day my head down lost in my own world of issues like many of you do daily i'm almost at the center of the yard i raised my head and muhammad ali was walking towards me time seemed to slow down as his eyes locked on mine and opened wide he's raised his fist into a quintessential guard i was game to play along with him to act as if i was a worthy opponent what an honor to be challenged by the goat the greatest of all time for a brief moment his face was as serious as if our frasier in the thrilling manila his movements his movements for flashes of a pass greater than i can imagine his security let the joke play along for a second before they ushered him away and i walked away floating like a butterfly i walked away amused at him amused at myself amused at life for this moment that almost no one would ever believe i walked away light ready to take on the world that is the magic of this place almost anything can happen here throughout ancient times institutions of learning have been built on top of heels to convey that great struggle is required to achieve degrees of enlightenment each of you had your own unique difficulties with the heel for some of you the challenge was academics and i want to say something to that you know sometimes your grades don't give a real indication of what your greatness might be for others it was financial you and your family struggled to make ends meet you had to work an extra job or two but you're here for a lot of you your hardest struggle was social [Music] some of you never fit in you were never as cool and as popular as you wanted to be and it bothers you so your social struggles here became psychological even though you made it up to heal you carry the baggage of rejection with you but you're here or some of you went through something traumatic you made it to the top of the hill but but not without scars and bruises some of you fit in too much you're waiting until the last minute to do your best work and it's a wonder that you made it up the hill at all because you carry the baggage of too much acceptance most of you graduating here today struggled against one or more of the impediments or obstacles i mentioned in order to reach this hilltop when completing a long climb one first experiences dizziness disorientation and shortness of breath due to the high altitude but once you become accustomed to the climb your mind opens up to the tranquility of the triumph most of you need some realizations because right now you have some big decisions to make right now i urge you in your breath in your in your eyes in your in your in your consciousness invest in the importance of this moment and cherish it i know some of you by the party last night you should you should celebrate but this moment is also part of that celebration so savor the taste of your triumphs today don't just swallow the moment whole without digesting what has actually happened here look down over what you conquered and appreciate what god has brought you through i was on a roll when i entered the system of entertainment theater television and film in my first new york audition for a professional play i landed the lead role from that play i got my first agent from that agent i got an on-screen audition it was a soap proper it wasn't third watch it was a soap opera on a major network i scored that role too i felt like mike tyson when he first came on the scene knocking out opponents in the first round with this so proper gig i was already promised to make six figures more money than i had ever seen i was feeling myself but once i got the first script and was so problems you very often get the script the night before and you shoot the whole episode in one day with little to no time to prepare once i saw the role i was playing i found myself conflicted the role wasn't necessarily stereotypical a young man in his formative years with a violent streak pulled into the allure of gang involvement that's somebody's real story never judge the characters you play that's what we will always talk that's that's the first rule of acting and any role play honestly can be empowering but i was conflicted because this role seemed to be wrapped up in assumptions about us as black folk the writing failed to search for specificity plus there was barely a glimpse of positivity or talent in the character barely a glimpse of hope i would have to make something out of nothing i was conflicted how it instilled in me a certain amount of pride and for my taste this road didn't live up to those standards it was just my luck that after filming the first two episodes execs of the show called me into their offices and told me how happy they were with my performance they wanted me to be around for a long time they said if there was anything that i needed just let them know that was my opening i decided to ask them some simple questions about the background of my character questions that i felt were pertinent to the plot question number one where is my father the exact answer well he left when you were younger of course okay okay question number two in this script it alluded to my mother not being equipped to operate as a good parent so why why exactly when my little brother and i have to go into foster care matter of factly he answered well of course she's on heroin that could be real i guess but i didn't want to assume that's what it was if we're around here assuming that the black characters in the show are criminals on drugs and dead then that would peop be stereotypical wouldn't it that word stereotypical lingers one of the execs pulled out my resume and began studying it the other exec war smile trying to live up to what they had promised me only a few moments before if there's anything you need just let us know she said as as you have seen things move really fast around here but we are more more than happy to connect you with the writers if you have suggestions yeah i said that that would be great i said because i'm just trying to do my homework on this i didn't i didn't know if you guys had decided on all the facts but maybe there's some things we could come up with some talent or gift that we can build maybe he's really good at math or something he has to be active i'm doing my best not to play this his character like a victim so you went to howard university huh the exec holding my resume interrupted peeking over the pages yes i said proudly he slid my resume back in his desk and said thank you for your concerns we'll be watching you i left the office i shot the episode i had come in to shoot on that day probably the best one i did out of the three because i got what was bothering me off my chest i was let go from that job on the next day phone call from my agent they decided to go another way the questions that i asked set the producers on guard and perhaps pave the way for a less stereotypical portrayal for the black actor that stepped into the role after me as the scripture says i planted the seed and apollos watered it but god kept growing god kept it growing yet and still when you invest in a seed watching it grow without you that is a good appeal to swallow a bitter pill anybody that's ever been fired knows what i'm talking about even if you really don't want the job when they let you go it's like any breakup you act like you don't care i didn't need that damn job anyway i didn't need them but when you have those moments alone you start to wonder if there was a better way to handle it and if you could have if you could have handled it better maybe you could help your family and then before you know it you're broke and you find yourself scraping together change just so you can ride the subway so that you can get the next job and maybe if you can book something else that would eclipse the feeling of doubt that's building but it seems like you can't pay them to hire you now my agents at the time told me it might be a while before i got a job acting on screen again but that was fine because i never wanted to act in the first place i and i definitely didn't want to be caught dead going after a fake hollywood pipe dream i'm more of a writer director anyway so forget their stories i can tell my own stories as conflicted as i was before i lost the job as adamant as i i was about the need to speak truth to power i found myself even more conflicted afterwards sometimes you need to get knocked down before you can really figure out what your what your fight is and how you need to fight it at some point my mom reverted back to my experiences here to the professors that challenged me and struggled against me finally i thought of ali in the middle of the yard it is elder years drawing from his victories and his losses at that moment i realized something new about this the greatness of ali and how he carried his crown i realized that he was transferring something to me on that day he was transferring the spirit of the fighter to me sometimes you need to feel the pain and sting of defeat to activate the real passion and purpose that god predestined inside of you god says in jeremiah i know the plans i have for you plans to prosper you and not to harm you plans to give you hope and a future hear me well on this day when you have reached the hilltop and you are deciding on next jobs next steps careers further education you would rather find purpose than a job or career purpose crosses disciplines purpose is an essential element of you it is the reason you are on the planet at this particular time in history your very existence is wrapped up in the things you are here to fulfill whatever you choose for a career path remember the struggles along the way are only meant to shape you for your purpose when i dare to challenge the system that would relegate us to victims and stereotypes with no clear historical backgrounds no hopes or talents when i questioned that method of portrayal a different path opened up for me the path to my destiny when god has something for you it doesn't matter who stands against it [Music] god will move someone is holding you back away from the door and put someone there who will open it for you if it's meant for you i don't know what your future is but if you're willing to take the harder way the more complicated one the one with more failures at first their successes the one that has ultimately proven to have more meaning more victory more glory then you will not regret it now this is your time the light of new realization shines on you today how its legacy is not wrapped up in the money that you will make but the challenges that you choose to confront as you commence to your past press on with pride and press on with purpose god bless you i love you howard power forever [Music] i mean the technology is great you know it's lots of fun very helpful makes a lot of things easy um but like anything in the world there's um there is too much of a good thing you know um and i think one of the things we don't talk about is what is the balance of technology in our lives and i would argue that for many of us it's out of balance we know that the chemical dopamine is released whenever we get a bing buzz flasher beep from our phone or email right so dopamine is the exact same chemical that's released in alcohol nicotine and gambling right in other words it can be addictive if left unbalanced a little alcohol is great too much alcohol not so great gambling is fun too much gambling really bad right technology is wonderful too much technology can be very destructive and destroy our relationships like all addictions destroy our relationships right um and so what the one thing we're not considering is what is the right balance if you wake up in the morning and you check your phone before you say good morning to your spouse that's a problem right if you have phantom beeps that's a problem that comes from something right um if you find yourself incapable of getting through a day without needing to check that's a problem right now where it gets really dangerous is with kids millennials some of them aren't kids anymore right so almost all alcoholics on the planet discovered alcohol when they were children when we're very very young the only thing we need is the approval of our parents right when we go through adolescence we now need approval from our peers frustrating for our parents very important for us because it allows us to acculturate outside of our immediate families into the larger group right very stressful time and we're supposed to learn in this time of anxiety to rely on our friends to reach out to our friends for help that's we're supposed to learn some people quiet by accident discover alcohol and they learn the numbing effects of dopamine actually help them get through the stress of adolescence this connection unfortunately becomes hardwired and so for the rest of their lives when they face any kind of financial career or social stress they don't turn to a person they turn to the bottle right now we have age restrictions on alcohol cigarettes and gambling because we know that an immature mind is not yet strong enough or mature enough to deal with the powers of these addicting chemicals these addictive chemicals right so we put an age limit we have no such age limit or age restriction on social media or cell phones right so ostensibly what we've done is we've thrown open the liquor cabinet and we've said to our adolescents hey i know this whole adolescent thing is really stressful so here's the vodka take as much as you need that's basically what we've done and so what we have is an entire generation that's growing up addicted and like all addicts they haven't learned the skill set of when they suffer stress to turn to a person what they do is they turn to the device and what that only does is increase senses of isolation and loneliness and can actually destroy relationships we've all had the experience where you're with somebody walking down the street in a meeting out for dinner whatever and they pull out their phone and you feel like an idiot right or when you're talking to them and they're going uh-huh uh-huh you sort of like what am i what's the point of this now take an entire generation that has no memory of a time before the device we at least can reference times before cell phones and internet and social media we at least have a point of reference they don't so this is their normal that that's how they feel so you have an entire generation growing up with addiction and an increased sense of loneliness and isolation we're already seeing the results we're seeing increased rates of suicide amongst this generation we're seeing increased rates of accidental deaths due to overdoses amongst this generation we're seeing increased numbers of mass homicides largely performed by this generation school shootings yeah over 70 perpetrated by kids born after the year 1984. we um schools universities are now dealing with numbers they've never dealt with before of kids requesting leaves of absence due to depression we're already seeing it right we're seeing the effects of loneliness and isolation we're seeing it and yet we're not reacting to it we're not doing anything about it right and parents are a lot to blame for this because parents there are some schools who want to restrict phones in schools and it's the parents who demand that they keep their phones in case of emergencies seriously seriously when was the last time the cell phone was used for an emergency what time are you coming home what time should we pick you up and if there is an emergency you call the office and they know what classroom the kids in and in five minutes they'll bring the kid to talk to you on the phone like the old way worked just fine remember we talked before about innovation it has to solve a real human problem what human problem exactly did we solve by compressing the five-minute time frame we added the problem we didn't solve it so that's one huge problem so combine that with the facts you have a an addicted generation that doesn't have the skill set to ask for help combined with the fact that they're so good at facebook and instagram they're good at putting filters on everything so they're good at showing you how smart and strong they are these kids who commit suicide you go look at their instagrams you would have no clue that they were depressed because they're happy and they're star athletes right you'd have no clue because they're really good so when we say silly things like my door is always open you're assuming they have the courage to come in combined with the fact that they're subject largely not all but too many to a failed parenting strategy because their parents told them they were special they could have anything they wanted they can be anything they want they got medals for coming in last which by the way we know doesn't work it devalues the medal for the one who comes in first and the one who came in last it makes them feel stupid because they know they didn't deserve it right the kids got into honors classes not because they deserved it but because the parents complained and some of them got good grades not because they earned them but because the teachers didn't want to deal with the parents and then the kids graduate college and they get a job and in an instant they find out they're not special they don't get anything for coming in last the parents can't get them a promotion and you can't have whatever you want just because you want it and in an instant their entire self-image is shattered and so you have an entire generation growing up with lower self-confidence than previous generations so you have lower self-confidence than previous generations combined with an inability to ask for help with things that you're struggling with and you turn to social media or device you keep checking you keep checking you count your likes you count your likes you count your followers you count your followers if somebody unfriends you oh my god it's trauma right the way they break up with each other is they just ghost each other just cut each other out and stop returning to text returning text and returning phone calls because they don't have the skill set to say hey it's not working out it's not me it's you right there's no closure on things right combined with the fact there's an institutionalized impatience so they've grown up in a world of instant gratification you want to buy something you go on amazon it shows up the next day you want to get in touch with someone you don't leave a message on their machine and wait four hours for them to get the message you just text them and they get back to you immediately you want to watch a movie you just log on and watch it you don't have to check movie times right everything happens you want to get a date swipe right you don't even have to muster up the courage to go up like hey you know you don't have to there you go got a date right and so the problem is they're accused of being entitled i don't think they're entitled at all not at all i think they're impatient i keep meeting these fantastic smart driven ambitious idealistic fantastic kids who graduated school they got a job they want to make an impact in the world and i go up to them and say how is it going and they say i think i'm going to quit i'm like why they're like i'm not making an impact i'm like you've been here eight months and it's as if it's as if they see the summit of a mountain as if they're standing at the foot of a mountain they can see the summit they can see the thing they want i want to make an impact what they don't see is the mountain this large immovable object you can go up fast you can go up slow i don't care but there's still a mountain what they don't understand is that life that relationships and career fulfillment are a journey there's no app for that i got nothing you've got to go through the slow plotting annoying meandering process called career and life but if they don't get it in eight months they go look for it somewhere else they don't get it they go look for it it's impatience and because they don't have the skill set to ask for help and because they feel lonely it compounds and compounds so then we dump them in office environments that are built on theories from the 80s and 90s that prioritizes a number before a person and no one really cares about their confidence and their personal growth they're just numbers on a spreadsheet and so they enter work cultures that don't help them and the problem is they're entering the workforce at a deficit i hear from kids they tell me that they struggle to form deep meaningful relationships and the companies don't care and so it's destructive to them as individuals but ultimately it'll hurt the companies because more and more millennials are entering the workforce i believe to your point about solution that now the responsibility on companies is even greater than it's ever been before to take care of its people because if the environments in which we're asking our youngest workers to work in isn't built to help them i can't even imagine what the suicide and and homicide and just the rates of depression you know an accidental death due to overdose are going to look like in the future it's going to reach epidemic proportions it's already the the statistics are already alarming and yet nobody's sounding any alarm bells parents have to intervene we have to stop giving our kids free access to social media and phones at young ages they are not ready for it their minds cannot cope with the dopamine balance is fine you can give a kid a phone but they can't use it in their bedroom they can't have it at the dinner table they can't take it to school they can only have it up to a certain hour and you take it away they're children you can take the phone away we've got to intervene as parents but as companies we now have to deal with the influx of kids that are coming into our companies with addiction watch i see it all the time walk through any office you'll see the older employees have their phones on the sides of their computers as they're working you'll see the youngest employees have their phones face up in front of their keyboards between their arms as they're working and this is how they work and this is the science is alarming they did experiments on mice where they they did the multitasking they put flashing lights to mimic going from the computer to the cell phone the computer to the cell phone to the tv the mice that were exposed to the changing lights it took them three times longer to solve a maze than the mice that weren't and the damage was permanent it didn't improve when they stopped the lights and leadership now is even more important yeah and the leaders now are even more irresponsible you are responsible for the lives of human beings and some of these human beings are your children so okay you bad ceo who thinks all the stuff that i talk about is craziness and you don't have time to make these changes this is i hear we don't have time it's a war out there i've actually heard executives tell me that it's a war out there i don't have time for this leadership stuff i know guys who go to war and i'll tell ya it's not a war what you're going through you know you tinker with money it's not a war you do have time for this and if it's really that way then what were you doing when it wasn't a war it's even more it's what an indictment that in peaceful times when times were good that you weren't focusing on this stuff right but my point is is a lot of these executives have children of this age working at other companies and my question is would you like those other companies would you like those other executives to care about the growth of your child the confidence of your child the career success of your child would you like those other companies to help your kids learn the skills of social interaction the ability to ask for and receive help would you like their jobs to give that to them set the example do it for other people's children every single employee 100 is someone someone someone's daughter a hundred percent and if you want someone to take responsibility for the life of your children in their company then why don't we start taking responsibility for the lives of the children in our companies when you realize that your name your form and everything you see is provisional two things happen to some people they have immediate what we could only metaphorically call the dark knight of the soul they go into a deep depression because everything they thought was real is no longer real including their own name form body and mind some people get so scared that they have a bad trip some people cross that threshold and discover nirvana or enlightenment and they say wow i thought i was i was squeezed into the volume of a body in the span of a lifetime but i'm a timeless being that can morph myself into any experience including the human experience which is amazing but the human experience is also that which causes existential depression so the causes of human suffering since you brought it up are brought up in eastern wisdom traditions as number one you suffer because you don't know who you are you confuse yourself with your body-mind experience number two you grasp and cling at experiences which are evanescent and transitory and dreamlike you say what happened to your childhood it's over what happened to yesterday it's over what happened to five minutes ago it's over what happens to these words by the time you hear them they don't exist so you know wittgenstein the german philosopher said we are asleep our life is a dream but once in a while we wake up enough to know that we are dreaming so what do you wake up to when you cross this threshold you wake up to your true self which is not body of mind but the awareness in which that experience is happening so grasping and clinging at a dream is the second cause of human suffering the third is being afraid of anything that's unpleasant pain abandonment being treated by someone uh not respectfully so that's you know there's aversion to certain experiences third cause of suffering fourth is identifying which is related to it with your ego identity and fifth is the fear of death now they're all connected they're all the same fear and they are not knowing who you are this is the biggest question everybody should be asking who am i what am i am i the changing experience of this body which is a perceptual activity am i the experience of the changing mind or the changing personality because you don't have the same personality when you were a kid or maybe even 10 years ago what is it at the basis of this when you start that reflective self-inquiry ask yourself who am i what do i want what is my purpose what am i grateful for go into the stillness of meditation you have what wisdom traditions have called revelation revealed truth now you know that sounds very grand i would say just call it insight you know meditation mindfulness awareness of body awareness of mind awareness of mental space awareness of the web of relationship awareness with that which we call the universe it leads you ultimately to the awareness of awareness and when you discover that that's nirvana now everyday experience is modified consciousness so right now what you're experiencing is what we call the waking state of consciousness so awareness is modifying itself every time you open your eyes into this experience right and you call it the physical world now if you close your eyes you have another state of consciousness where you don't actually experience the physical world you experience sensations images thoughts emotions stories it's like a dream as soon as you close your eyes you're experiencing you might call it daydreaming but there's no difference between a dream and what you dream at night the physical world has disappeared there's only a mental world then you go deeper at night even the mental world disappears in what we call deep deep sleep now that is the highest intelligence by the way because in deep sleep there's unconscious processing going on there's creativity going on there are correlations being made there are toxins being removed there's a whole resetting of your memories and consolidation of that so in deep sleep even though there is no experience of a physical or a mental world it's a very intelligent highly highly correlated state in which unconscious processing is occurring memories are being consolidated imagination is being refined etc even though you have no conscious experience so think of these three states metaphorically like you would think of water becoming ice as the physical world water as water fluid dreamy water as vapor even more dreamy and fluctuating and ambiguous and contradictory and difficult to grasp but if you want little bit beyond that i'm speaking metaphorically you'd end up with what is called the quantum vacuum which is the fundamental ground of existence according to science but you can do that subjectively you can move from the physical world to the dream world to the sleep world and beyond to what is called fundamental consciousness which is the source of all knowing all experience in wisdom traditions it's called undifferentiated consciousness so what is reality what we call reality what today's science calls reality comes under the heading of naive realism einstein was a naive realist and i'm not saying this in a derogatory fashion it's it's it's a word in the science of philosophy naive realism means that the physical world exists exactly as perceived by the five human senses now obviously that's not true other species experience the world through different modes of sensory perception the second aspect of naive realism is that the physical world as perceived by the five human senses would exist even if no one was observing it well how do you prove that and firstly it's naive because we know that the world is more than what is perceived by the five human senses so this leads us to a solution actually of the heart problem of consciousness which is get rid of the idea that the world is physical what we call of the world as physical even your physical body is a perceptual activity and that perceptual activity for you and me is a human perceptual activity through human consciousness not through bad consciousness not through mosquito consciousness not through plant consciousness but non-dualism says go beyond that there is only one consciousness that is differentiating you know undifferentiated consciousness differentiating into these different species of consciousness that form a matrix of conscious beings that are collectively projecting this universe i don't think consciousness being formless and infinite is subject to either birth or death this is a vacation we are having on planet earth right now and so might as well enjoy it but death is not the end of consciousness it's the end of a certain storyline in consciousness a certain interpretation of perceptions images feelings and thoughts it's not that i don't think about death i ask myself what is beyond my provisional identity and i dwell in that and that has a very interesting outcome which is the outcome in every spiritual tradition there are only three things that happen by the way in a religious or traditional experience one is transcendence you know that you are not an entity in space and time that your true self is formless infinite unbounded borderless unfettered free consciousness number one number two you have the emergence of what usually are referred to as platonic truths goodness beauty harmony love compassion joy equanimity and number three loss of the fear of death there's nothing more important than having those three experiences and they've been part of every wisdom tradition for thousands of years love is not a sentiment love is not an emotion love is the ultimate truth at the heart of creation which is unity consciousness one consciousness differentiating into infinite modes of experience infinite noise infinite modes of knowing infinite phenomena known all generated within the one's self just like when you were just a fertilized ovum you were one step cell stem cell pluripotential cell it became eyes it became nose it became fingernails it became heart it became brain so that one cell differentiated into all these different cells each with its own modality of experience like that the one mind the one consciousness differentiates itself into what we call the universe with every species of consciousness knowing the universe in its own unique way [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Motivation Madness

Views: 1,450,076

Keywords: motivational video, motivation, motivational speech, speech, motivational, success, inspirational video, motivation madness, 2021 motivation, motivation for 2021, 2021, 2021 motivational video, motivational speech compilation, best motivation, thought provoking, 3 hours, of your life, change your future, les brown, david goggins, elon musk, jordan peterson, kobe bryant, denzel washington, sadhguru, dandapani, robert kiyosaki, deepak chopra, chadwick boseman, joe dispenza, sinek

Id: OPtfVBi5aSE

Length: 183min 30sec (11010 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 15 2021